


Body Language

by AyYouFiction



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-03-09 01:13:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3230645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AyYouFiction/pseuds/AyYouFiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orphaned at fourteen, her only living relative has all but abandoned her for the last four years, but there’s a chance she could have everything she has ever wanted in a new world below the surface, a new family, and a new name: Katniss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
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> 
> 
> A lot of patience is richly rewarded when it comes to this story. It is Everlark, trust me on this.
> 
> A quick warning. I did not have a beta for this story so please continue with that in mind.  
> I own nothing of the original Hunger Games content. Everything else is mine.

I slam the screen door behind me, but I know it makes no difference. My aunt wouldn’t have noticed that I did it or that I’m leaving without telling her where I’m going, even if she were here.

When my mother and father died four years ago, she was the only family I had left to take me in. She reminds me that I should be grateful to have a roof over my head—even if the roof belongs to her latest “friend”—and clothes on my back—bought by her latest “friend”—but other than that, it’s clear I’m alone in the world. There are times when the loneliness gets to me and I ask for us to spend time together, only to have her explain to me in great detail,  with that sickeningly sweet voice of hers, how she doesn’t have the time, that there are very important matters for her to attend to.

“Chin up, up up,” she tells me when I sulk at her answer, ending her speech with a rousing pep-talk about how lucky I am that her latest male friend will take us shopping.

At the moment, we’re staying in his house that’s only walking distance from the beach. This current “friend” of hers has the habit of glancing in my direction a little too often. During meals, his hand slips onto my knee under the table, and I’ve learned quickly not to jump at his touch but merely slide my legs in the opposite direction beyond his easy reach. It's a harder task than most would think because my aunt constantly reminds me that the position isn’t lady-like. “Back straight, elbows off the table, and legs and feet under it.”

It’s nights like these, when my aunt is out handling her “very important matters” all the while leaving me alone with him, that I have to leave the house. He seems to catch me whenever I go to the bathroom, lurking at the door to stand in my way as I try to exit. He’s always too close, his eyes are always too focused on my chest or my rear.

The sun is setting and I usually don’t like to go to the beach at night, but I prefer that over him any time.

By the time I make it to the beach, the sun’s kissing the horizon. It’s light plays against the waves in shimmers, something beautiful to see, helping me forget why I’m here in the first place. Not many are out at the moment, preferring to be in their homes with the families who love them and want them. I see their lights from inside their houses, and they make me wonder if my family could have been one of them if my parents hadn’t died or even if my aunt cared just a little bit.

The thought makes me return my focus to the horizon, to the water, because those thoughts only lead to that hollow feeling in my chest and tear-streaked cheeks.

Something in the water catches my eye, a break in the shimmers skittering over the water. It looks like someone swimming, but who would be that foolish to swim so far out at nightfall? As quickly as it appeared it was gone. I watch the spot for any signs of the swimmer, but there’s none.

My periphery catches another break in the water closer to where I am on the beach, a distance too far for a swimmer to cross so quickly, so I disregard it as aquatic life of some sort, perhaps even a dolphin or a shark. Just as I’m ready to turn my head, I see arms flailing from the surface of the water. There’s no doubt that it’s a swimmer drowning, panicking. If I had time to think it through, I would have come to the life preserving conclusion that rushing out there to help them would only risk my life as well as theirs. That swimming at night without the lifeguards present is just asking for trouble. These are the things I would have thought about if I had the time to think it through, but I don’t.

I rush out into the water with only the thought that someone’s dying before my eyes, and I have to help them. I’m not the best swimmer, but I manage to make it to the spot I think I’d seen the arms.

There’s no sign of the swimmer, no sign of anything but me surrounded by water and the sun steadily disappearing. The lights in the houses are my only guide back to the beach, but again, my periphery catches movement. It’s something dark in the water that slithers towards me, reaching it’s tentacles out for me. The fear I feel is transformed into action as I swim faster than I ever have before. The lights at the beach grow larger as I get closer, but I chance a look behind me to see the tentacles catching up no matter how fast I swim.

It catches my ankle first, wrapping around my feet and up my legs. I instinctively reach for whatever it is that’s holding me to free the lower half of my body, but it’s no use. It feels like slippery foliage tangled everywhere, and the more I fight it, the more I sink. It covers everything up to my lower ribs, but doesn’t stop there, weaving upward until my arms and chest are covered as well.

I can’t breathe, but I don’t know if it’s because I can’t bring myself to breathe in the water and let death come or because the seaweed is constricting my chest. I just know that I’m sinking and I can’t stop it. And then the sun disappears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Each comment left is like a little piece of the puzzle. Let's finish the picture together. :)


	2. The Float

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you who commented, kudo'd, and bookmarked this story.

The first breath I take is strange. It’s more of a gasp but my mouth is closed and my nose is covered. The slippery foliage unravels around me until it retreats completely into the black of the water, leaving me curled up and floating. My legs are bent with my knees close to my chest, and my arms are tucked in close. Thoughts come and go, some as memories very familiar to me and some not, but all of them are fleeting because I can’t maintain a single one. Not that I care; it’s peaceful this way.

There’s a distorted light glowing in my periphery, and as it creeps its way into my full sight, I realize that I’m spinning slowly, that I’m underwater and it’s the moon I see from below the surface. There’s no way to know if it’s distorted because the surface of the water is churning or because there’s something wrong with my vision. Either way, seeing it reminds me of where I should be and what I should be doing: swimming towards it to save myself. The more I try to swim, the more my body twists and turns in all directions in the water. And it hurts…a lot.

My arms cut through the liquid easily, but my legs are painfully stiff and uncooperative, refusing to move as they should. I make so little progress covering the distance to the surface that I wonder if I can hold my breath long enough to somehow reach it.

Only now does it occur to me that I’m not holding my breath. Even as I stop all movement and close my eyes to concentrate, I inhale deeply and I feel my body drifting in the gentle current of the water. There’s a whoosh at my neck, behind my ears specifically, and I tentatively touch my fingers to it. There are ridges that break into sections along the unusually smoother, slicker skin. The other side of my neck is the same when I check.

My eyes snap open and there is a soft, pulsing light that’s just enough to see my hands in front of my face, to see the webbing in between my fingers. I scramble out for something to hold, to anchor me so that I can get my bearings, but there’s nothing to hold on to. I’m in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water, all I end up achieving is flailing my arms around and losing track of where the moon and the surface are.

In the murky darkness is a flash of light and I desperately try to reach for it, but then I realize it’s some distance away. I try to swim towards it, but with my uncooperative legs, it might as well be the moon. So I decide to close my eyes and try to calm myself.

It’s only a few seconds before a feminine voice echoes in my ears, “There you are!”

I open my eyes and see a faint light reflected off the faces of a man and a woman before she adds, “For the love of…cover her.” A material slips around me and covers me, envelops me to where I can only see through the small portion that doesn’t. Strong arms wrap around me firmly, and I’m moving. It’s a strange kind of rescue, to be pulled this way, but I’m just thankful that I’m being rescued at all. It was almost nighttime when I jumped into the water, and there was no one else on the beach, no one to notice me missing or drowning.

“What happened to you?” the female voice asks me, and I try to open my mouth but choke on the water that rushes inside which makes me wonder how she’s manages words so clearly. However she does, it’s clear that I can’t which is why I choose not to say a word until we get back to the beach.

Except we’re not headed towards the beach or even the surface. We’re sinking, fast, and when I struggle to turn and look back, the glow of the moon quickly shrinks until it’s nothing more than a tiny, white dot in the distance before it fades completely.

I don’t understand how this could be, how I’m still alive, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m alive. Every muscle in my body hurts as though they’ve all been strained to their limits, and death isn't supposed to hurt.

Ahead of where they’re pulling me is what looks like a net of red veins pulsing with blood. It weaves into itself tightly until they pull me even closer to it to see that they aren’t veins but lava, several rivers of lava crossing and weaving over a great mountain, and at it’s peak is their source spewing fiery liquid everywhere. Beside it is another mountain, but it’s nothing like its fiery twin. This one reflects the reddish glow of the lava but it’s peaks reach upward in sharp, pearlescent spires, riddled with holes.

This is where they’re taking me, whoever they are, and as we go through one of the holes and follow the path, I realize that the holes are actually entryways to tunnels and chambers spread throughout the spires. It’s more like the inside of an anthill.

They release me inside one of those chambers where I just float across it. I no longer have the material covering me which leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable to everything around me.

There’s a soft light reflecting against the walls and I have time, now, to look at the people who brought me here. The male with black hair eyes me curiously while the female beside him seems bored with the whole situation, her short, brown hair swaying with the least bit of movement of her head. Her eyes dart down below my waist before they roll away in disgust as she moves further away from me. “Control yourself,” she mutters as her arms fold across her chest.

She twists her body just so, and I see the one detail that had eluded me all of this time. Her face, her narrowed shoulders and exposed breasts—all of the skin slick and unnaturally smooth—are not so subtle hints that this is a female, but the skin below her belly button gradually transitions into copper colored scales that cover her entire lower half. That’s not the detail that surprises me the most. It’s that where her legs should be is a tail, a fish’s tail. The male is the same.

Scrambling for something, anything to hold onto, I sink to the floor. The polished surface is something to cling to, so I do with my fingertips as best I can. The look on her face tells me that she’s had enough, and bellows, “Sae!”

Before I can stop myself, my eyes drift down to the lower half of my own body and realize that I’m like them. My legs are gone, and in their place is a red tail that tapers as I follow it down to where my ankles should be. From there, two large, billowing fins spread out gracefully. As though that’s not enough for me to deal with, my tail is actually the source of light in the room, flashing in an erratic pattern. I try to swim away but only cause the tail to thrash wildly causing orange and yellow to reflect over the red undertone, looking very much like fire. As though it would make any more sense, I scrub down the scales at my waist hoping to slide them off of me like a suit. Needless to say, it doesn’t work and only draws an exasperated snort from the female.

I’m screaming. The strain at my throat and the high, piercing sound is evidence as the male and female cover their ears just before I close my eyes and cover my own.

I scream and channel all of my confusion and fear into it until I have nothing left. My mouth is filled with water and I can’t help but to swallow it. Surprisingly, it doesn’t choke me if I don’t fight it. There’s not enough time to try and make sense of all of these things before someone screams, “Katniss!” and my lower half is encircled by small arms.

When I look down, there’s a head of blond hair fanning all around my middle and through the strands I can make out what looks like a child…with a tail.

“They said you were dead,” the little creature says and her tail is glowing in an erratic pattern different from my own. She pulls her face from my tail and smiles up at me with big, blue eyes that melt my heart as her blond hair drifts around to frame her face. She seems just as scared as I am and for some reason she thinks I’m someone named Katniss, someone she obviously cares for who’s thought to be dead. I can’t break her heart and tell her the truth, that I’m not her Katniss, so I wrap an arm around her to pull her in tightly.

“It’s okay,” I try to tell her, but the words don’t come out the way they should. My lungs force out something that sounds like a squeal and click. She freezes against me and then moves away slowly with wide, frightened eyes.

Another woman…with a tail…much older than the others if the looser skin along her face and torso are any indication, enters the chamber and eyes me the moment she sees me. Her appraising look makes the glow from my tail change patterns as I try to cover my chest, more aware that my breasts are exposed.

“This isn’t Katniss,” the little creature tells the older woman, her lip trembling and expressive eyes looking as though they might shed a tear, not that it would be obvious if she did when they’re surrounded by water.

“Let’s see,” she says before approaching me, then uses her finger to lift my chin so that we’re eye to eye. There’s something she’s searching for, but I don’t think she finds it because her brows dip and crease deeply before she releases me.

“No, this isn’t Katniss,” she says, but this time I’m paying careful attention to the way her mouth moves with the words that she says. She’s not speaking words but her mouth opens to let out squeals and whines and clicks, but for some reason their meaning is just as instant as though someone were speaking to me in words I understand.

“Who are you?” the first of these females I’d ever seen, the one with the brown hair and copper tail, rushes at me with a spear I didn’t know she was holding until it’s pressed to the center of my chest.

My tail continues to glow, dimming and brightening in a pattern that speeds up in time with my mounting fear for my life. I lean back and away from it, which causes me to lose my orientation, pinwheeling in the water without any sense of direction or ability to stop it. “Johanna, enough!” the older woman says before I feel solid hands still and then right me with the others. I’m in the hands of the male with the black hair, and he gives me a slight, comforting smile and for a fleeting moment I hope it’s a sign that I won’t have to fear him as well.

When he releases me, I sink slowly to the floor of the chamber. I cover my face with my hands and wish all of this away. If I concentrate enough, I might be able to wake myself.

“Who are you?” the older woman is beside me and it makes me jump. I’m afraid that I’ll lose my orientation again, so my impulse is to sink as far down on the floor as I can with my hands flat as though they can attach themselves to it. When I think I’m as stable as I can be, I look up at her and try to say my name but the water rushes inside my lungs the way it did when they first found me, and I choke and sputter.

The older woman’s already shaking her head with a look on her face as her eyes are on me. “My name is Sae,” she clicks and squeaks and squeals, adding while gesturing to those around her, “and this is Johanna, Gale, and Prim.”

So now I know their names, but it doesn’t even begin to explain what’s going on. The female with the brown hair, Johanna, secures her spear to the strap at her back. She doesn’t seem convinced that I’m no threat, but the older female, Sae, has decided I’m not whether she agrees or not.

Johanna and the black haired male, Gale, slowly float backwards with the smaller fins at their hips fluttering. The little creature, the little, blond female called Prim, comes forward to get a good look at me. “Sae, she didn’t tell me to leave her alone and go away.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“she can't be Katniss, but she looks just like Katniss.”

“I know child.”

I don’t like that they’re talking about me right in front of me as though I’m not there. I want to ask so many questions—there are so many in my mind—so I choose one and focus on the thought and not so much the words. “Why am I here?”

It works. I don’t choke or sputter, and what I wanted to say came out as a couple of clicks and a lower pitched squeak. Johanna comes in close, her hand gripped tightly around the spear.

“What was the last thing you remember, before us?” Sae asks me after stopping Johanna with just a look.

I tell them—creating the words as I did before by concentrating on the thoughts before allowing my brain to do the rest—about being on the beach and seeing the panicking swimmer. How I tried to help but was pulled down deep into the water by what I could only guess was seaweed before Johanna and Gale found me. Sae’s brows dip down again, and she turns away from me, muttering, “The float.”

Johanna and Gale’s faces twist in confusion before Sae continues talking to me. “There’s a very old myth that if a human is close when one of us is killed, the human will be chosen to take his or her place if there’s unfinished business. It’s called the float.”

“I’m taking someone’s place?” I ask, not having to focus on that thought for much more than a second before it comes out in more clicks and squeaks and squeals and whines.

Sae loops her arm under mine and pulls me towards one of the walls. There’s a reflective surface framed in stone that she levels me with. This is the first time I see myself since the beach and the person staring at me isn’t me. She has black hair that is braided to the side and her skin is slick and smooth. The ridges I felt behind my ears before are there, and in the mirror I can see clearly that they’re gills.

“Her name was Katniss. She was our leader,” Sae says to me. “Your name is Katniss, and you are our leader, now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fanfic authors live on caffeine and comments. Please help feed a fanfic author today!


	3. City of Fire

“Katniss,” someone calls from behind me as I lean against the wall and look through one of the slotted openings of my chamber. It’s just large enough to see outside where the rivers of lava flow slowly down the mountain. There are others outside, other people with tails swishing, going about their lives for the day. The first time I saw them out there was just as shocking as when I realized that I had a fishtail that first night, but it's been almost two weeks and even though it's still strange to me, it's nowhere near as shocking.

At least I can tell day from night now by the subtle shift in ambient light around us. That took some time too.

The voice calls, “Katniss,” again, and this time I remember that I’m supposed to answer to that name here. Prim’s floating through the entrance guarded by Gale, waiting for me to respond. I’m relieved to see her and not Sae because the older woman has a tendency to study my every movement when I talk, and I find it distracting and uncomfortable. I’m even more relieved that it’s not Johanna who does nothing but glare at me with her hand on her spear and her lip curled.

With Prim, I don’t feel so alien in this strange world. “Hello, Prim,” I greet her with a smile because I can’t help but smile at her. Unlike the others, she doesn’t seem to want anything more than to spend time with me. She greets me back and enters the room until she’s somewhere in the middle, and then lets herself sink to the floor because she knows I feel most comfortable against a solid surface.

I join her, having learned how to use the fins at my hips for these finer movements, and wait for today’s lesson.

“There are how many cities?” she quizzes me, and my smile at her only grows wider because I remember the answer immediately.

“Twelve.”

My reward is a beaming smile from Prim as she brushes back her hair that’s slowly drifting in front of her face. Quickly, she schools her face into something more neutral before her eyes narrow at me which I’ve learned means I have a more challenging question ahead of me.

“Name them.”

And just as I suspected, it is a much harder question. There are the ones that stick out in my mind and count with my fingers as I name them, "Cities of...Silver...Gold...Fire....Sunset. Prim scrunches up her face while shaking her head at the last one. "City of the Setting Sun," she corrects me. With that, I can’t help but to huff in frustration. Sunset, setting sun, what’s the difference?

I continue listing them to get past my mistake before my frustration causes my tail to glow. I've been working so hard with Sae to control that.

Prim makes a squeaking sound that I’ve come to know as a sign of approval as her tail brightens in a repeating pattern of bright, dark before it stops abruptly. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly before looking down to where her hands rest over her tail. “You’ve gained more control over your lights in days than I have for my entire life.”

“And it's still not easy,” I assure her. Sae's relentless in her lessons as she works with me on my control when Prim isn’t quizzing me on the beginner’s guide to underwater politics. My motivation to learn as quickly as possible came when they explained that the pattern of the glow corresponds to the emotions of the person. For these people who experience the glowing lights from birth, it's nothing more than an embarrassment that they the lack self control, especially for those my age and older. For me, it's an unwelcome experience to have my emotions displayed for all to see.

Reading the patterns, however, doesn't come as naturally. Although, even in the last two days, I can identify glowing patterns of annoyance thanks to Johanna, curiosity thanks to Gale, and excitement, thanks to Prim.

“And which city do we live in?” Prim asks me, getting back to our task. Again, an easy question. “City of Fire,” I answer, thinking about the lava outside and Prim nods in approval.

“Good. You finally know where you are,” the impatient voice of Johanna sounds in the room. She’s floating into the chamber with Gale, who had been to the side, guarding the entrance, “It’s time for your tour of the city.”

I look to Prim for confirmation that her lesson is ending early before I look back at Johanna who looks down at my tail and gives an exasperated sound. “Sae _said_ she was in control,” she says to no one in particular before rolling her eyes.

“She can't come and go as she pleases like us," Prim defends me. "She spends most of her time here in these chambers. You’d glow too if you had limited freedom.”

Johanna simply rolls her eyes again but this time folds her arms across her chest. I can’t help but hug Prim for that, for defending me because I can’t remember the last time anyone’s done that since my parents were alive. At first, her body’s stiff against mine, but then she relaxes into my arms and I feel her little arms around wrap around me tightly.

“How…sweet,” Johanna says, but even in her squeaks and clicks I hear no sincerity. She turns to Gale and reminds him loudly enough for me and Prim to hear, “As we’ve discussed before, you’re to escort her through the city. You are to stay with her at all times. If something happens to her, something will happen to you, got it?”

This is for me as well. Johanna and Sae have made it clear that they can't allow anything to happen to me. I'm their last chance for whatever it is their Katniss was supposed to do. If I die, there won't be another to take my place...or so the myth about the Float goes.

Gale nods and Johanna leaves, her billowing fins are all we can see of the entrance before they disappear entirely with a final swish to the right of the outside corridor.

“When you’re ready,” Gale says to me before his head drops down to the floor when Prim and I focus our attention on him.

“I’ll see you for the meal when you're done?” Prim turns to me and asks me. It took a while to realize that they don’t have words for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. There are just meals periodically during the day, and I have to use context to know which one they’re talking about. I nod and rise from the floor, using the small fins at my hips to move my body slowly upward.

I’m still clumsy when it comes to my entire tail, always expecting to use two legs instead, and it shows as I make my way beside Gale. He leads me out of the chamber, the room I've spent most of my time in for almost two weeks, and through the tunnels but instead of stopping outside of the structure I once considered something like an anthill, he leads me to another chamber.

“Do you mind if we stop in my chamber for a moment? I haven’t been in it for some days and—”

It occurs to me that he’s been guarding me from the moment he found me with Johanna. It never occurred to me that he may have his own home and family to get back to. He looks weary from the darkening circles under his eyes to the dull look of his black hair, so I don’t let him finish the last of his words. “I don’t mind. Please do what you have to do.”

The entrance to his chamber is higher and narrower than mine, giving it far more privacy. He leads me through it and down a short corridor that adds more privacy I haven't experienced here. I guess because they want eyes on me at all times, I'll never get it.

I expect to find a beautiful woman and small, beautiful children, or at the very least a lover, waiting for him but there is nothing but one curvy table to the side with a mound of coral on top of it. The chamber is about the same size as mine with nothing else inside. He disappears inside the much smaller room that I've come to know as the equivalent of a bathroom. There's nothing for me to do but to allow my body to float as I’d learned to do with Sae and Prim. It’s a comfortable, weightless feeling that I’ve found to be very relaxing as my thoughts wander.

I wonder how it could be that no one’s waiting for him. Gale spends so much of his time guarding me that he couldn’t possibly have time enough to see a lover, and he’s so handsome. There has to be someone.

So preoccupied with whether or not Gale has someone, I don’t care that I’m spiraling slowly inside the room. I don’t need to orient myself when I’m alone, but when the coral mound on top of the table slowly slides into view, I see a flash of dark pink against the coral’s lighter pink. As graceless as I am, I twist and manage to turn so that it has my full attention. Using my hands to draw me in closer, the webbing between my fingers help with this motion, I could swear there’s an eye inside the coral before it vanishes just as quickly. I move closer, concentrating on the flutter of my fins at my hips.

Whatever is inside pulls back further into the coral which only makes me lean in even more until it springs out at me, wrapping itself around my neck. Whatever it is tightens as I scream which only causes the creature to spread from my neck to my mouth. It reminds me of what brought me underwater, and I scream louder and pull at it. It doesn't feel like foliage that brought me here but it's smooth skin that's typical of the people here.

“Katniss, it’s okay!” someone says near me, but I pay it no mind. I'm too busy fighting against whatever it is trying to smother me.

It’s Gale floating in front of me and his hand reaches for whatever it is around my neck. At his touch, the thing releases me, and I finally get a good look at my attacker.

It’s a squid, a little, pink mottled squid that wraps itself around Gale’s neck and shakes uncontrollably. “You scared Squiggles,” he says to me indignantly as he gently strokes the thing.

“ **I** scared Squiggles?” I sputter out the question in disbelief. “Your kidding, right?”

He gives the creature a few more strokes before gently returning it to its coral home. “I’ve had Squiggles since I was a little younger than Prim.”

“How…cute,” I tell him, sounding a little too much like Johanna, but his eyes dart down at the flashes of light coming from my tail. I'm so startled by my experience with the creature that I completely forgot to control it. My fear and annoyance are clear in the patterns flashing which makes him smirk. “You really should learn to control yourself.”

With a little concentration, the glow from my tail stops abruptly, and I roll my eyes, but not before I notice how refreshed my guard looks. His face is less haggard and his hair's glossy black again much like it was the day he and Johanna found me, and the change makes his gray eyes seem bluer.

“Shall we?” he asks me, gesturing towards the small corridor leading out of his chamber.

* * *

The City of Fire is as breathtaking as it was the first day I swam through it, coming alive during the day. The section we’re in is where most make their trades. Gale called it the Hob. As we pass through, several people stop to smile and nod their heads in acknowledgment of me, of Katniss. They have no idea that I’m not her. No one is supposed to know except for the two who found me, Sae and Prim.

At first, it was a bizarre feeling to be noticed, even if being mistaken for someone else, after spending so many years trying to stay out of the way of my aunt and her parade of boyfriends. Now, I don’t mind the attention so much. I’ve even learned to nod and smile in return and have even learned a few names of the vendors.

“Does everyone know who I am?” I remember asking Gale the first time we swam through the city. He nodded and then answered, “Of course they do. You’re their leader.”

Sae’s called me that before, but I’m still not sure what they mean by leader. What do they expect of me as their leader? Am I a princess? A queen? A president? I’m about to ask him when a woman hands me an oblong object the size of my fingernail, and I accept it after Gale nudges me with his elbow. "Take it. Food's very expensive and she's offering it as a gift. To refuse would hurt her feelings," he explains.

I take it, and hesitantly place it in my mouth. I try to smile for the woman, but I'm sure it comes out more as a grimace as I prolong the moment I bite into the thing. I've never seen anything like it with the food that they've given me since I've been here, round and black and shriveled even though it's been submerged in water for what I presume is its entire existence. It's only so long that I can hold off from actually eating it with the woman's expectant eyes still on me, so I bite down and the texture is very much like a prune but the first squirt of flavor is sour. Just as my face begins to contort at that, the flavor mellows into a sweetness that mixes with the saltiness of the water. It's amazing and unlike anything I've ever tasted that lingers for quite some time, even as we say our goodbyes and swim away.

Unlike our usual tour of the city, Gale leads me to the edge of the city, where many of the city's poor live, a place called the Seam. It’s uncomfortably hot here, and only gets hotter as we go even farther when the small fragile dwelling of the Seam become sparse. I feel as though the water is cooking me, and I don’t want to go any further, but he tells me, “Just a little bit closer.” It's not until we reach the summit of the hill at the end of the Seam that I see how close we are to the lava mountain.

The other side of the hill plummets into a cliff, and the view of the lava mountain is breathtaking. We are as close as we can get to it, and this is considered the worst part of the city. “There’s beauty in the most unlikely of places,” he says, but the way he's looking at me, I get the feeling he's not talking about the mountain.

I use my small fins at my hips to keep me in place as I watch the bright red and yellow flow slowly down the mountain. I can’t look away its so beautiful, and Gale admits softly that this is his favorite spot in the entire city.

“What did the other Katniss say when you brought her here?”

“I didn’t. Katniss hated coming to this side of the city and she hated the lava mountain. She would never have understood the beauty in it. But you do, don't you?”

There’s not much for me to say. “Yes,” doesn’t seem adequate enough to describe what I’m feeling as I watch the picturesque scene. Just as I tear my focus from it long enough to look in his direction, I catch the glimpse of his tail glowing bright, then brighter before it dims and fades completely.

* * *

“Did you enjoy your time outside?” Sae asks me, and I get the feeling that there’s more behind her question. Still, I glance at the entrance where Gale guards my chamber before I nod my head. The older woman seems pleased by the answer.

“I’d hoped that you would see the importance of our city, that you would want to help us.” She conveniently leaves out the fact that to help them may be the only way for me to get back to world I know, the one above the sea. I have very little choice. What they haven’t been willing to tell me in the last two weeks is what is it they need me to do to help them, so I ask.

“What is it you need me to do?”

Prim eyes Sae and the two share a look before their focus lands on me again. I let my tail glow with a pattern that must broadcast my impatience.

“The leader of the City of Silver, Coriolanus, wishes to arrange a union between our cities. He wanted her…wants you to marry his second son.”

Marry? The word flips in my head over and over until its the only thought there, shutting out everything Sae has to say afterward. I wonder if marriage means the same to them as it does for us above, and the unpleasant tingle along my scales follows when I realize that this may be what I have to do to get back there.

Slowly, the sound of Sae’s squeaks and clicks and squeals begin to penetrate my own thoughts again. “…but we know it’s for power. He wants control of both cities through his two sons.”

I blink at that. It may be the first time I’ve blinked since I’ve been down here in the water. I still have eyelids, I’ve seen them in my reflection several times, but they don’t seem to serve a practical purpose down here.

Sae's words sink in fully. Katniss, the original Katniss, was the piece in a power play. For all I know, it may have been the reason why she died in the first place. And now, it’s me at the center of it. It could be my life in danger at most, a forced marriage if I want to return home at least. As Sae and Prim describe the leader of the city and his sons, I realize it’s even more dire than I thought.

“With his eldest, to inherit the City of Silver and his youngest, to marry into this city, the combined forces of both cities would be no match for any of the others. And his sons are known for—” Sae stops at that and her eyes dart in the direction of a curious Prim before they return to me. It seems to be a universal signal for those above and below sea level that the conversation is not meant for certain people.

Sae stiffens her back and continues, “but we’ve set in motion an alternative, hopefully. We’ve requested a union with the City of the Setting Sun. They have three sons. The eldest has already taken leadership of the city, the middle son is married into another city. The third son is available. They are good and kind.”

Before Prim or I can say a word, and it’s written all over our tense faces and bodies that we are going to, Sae answers our question, “I know their mentor well. I used to watch over him in his youth.”

Their “mentor.” That simple word means so much for these people down here. Sae is Prim’s mentor. She was Katniss’s mentor, and now mine. No one has been able to describe to me the exact job requirements of a mentor other than to teach and guide the children of leaders. As far as I can tell, she’s a nanny, a governess, and a grandmother all in one. Since Katniss and Prim’s parents died, she may not be the authority—that was left to Katniss, now to me—but she is the one to have the authority’s ear. She’s the one to decide if the eldest child is fit for leadership.

It’s why Johanna—who I’ve learned in the time I’ve been here is the head of the guard—had to defer to Sae. In the hierarchy of leadership, there’s leader, mentor, head of guard.

“Have you ever met him…in person, this third son of the City of—” I begin to ask Sae but she interrupts to correct me, "The third son of the Setting Sun. His name is Peeta. And the second son of Silver is named Cato."

I’m not sure why I asked the question because I’m not sure how it would help. I’ve never met him, but then again, I’ve never met the other option for marriage, Cato. From what they tell me, though, it would be better for all involved if I marry Peeta. Still, Sae answers me by shaking her head. "When Katniss and I traveled to the City of the Setting Sun to speak with him, he said he already knew the circumstances but required time to think it through. He refused to see anyone from our city until he has his answer in six moons time.”

“Six moons?” I repeat in disbelief, and Prim nods, seemingly knowing this much of the events, then she says without trying to mask her doubt in the possible option, “This was just over a moon ago.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When you leave a comment, a fanfic fairy gets her wings.


	4. Choices to Be Made

Prim and Sae are speaking to me, but all I can think about is the time I’ve spent with Gale in the Hob and his favorite view of the lava mountain. Whatever it is that they’re saying to me is important and should have my attention, I know this, but I can’t bring myself to think of anything but his wide shoulders and how much the color of his eyes remind me of the sky, only brought out more by his black hair. Would he even understand what that means if I were to tell him that?

Prim squeaks something but the meaning doesn’t penetrate my brain as my eyes drift away from them and to the entrance of the new chamber I’ve been given. It has more privacy with the entrance higher than the last, much like Gale’s chamber.

“Katniss!” Prim calls but I barely hear her through my own thoughts, knowing Gale is just outside guarding me, which makes me smile. These are the times I have to remember that he was ordered to watch and protect me at all times, so of course he’s there. The idea that I’m nothing more than his assignment stings, only dulled by the fact that he’s taken me to his favorite view of the lava mountain. He shared that with me, and it’s that thought that leaves me with a growing excitement in anticipation of our next city tour after my time with Sae and Prim. There’s a glow below me which is enough of a distraction to hear Prim and Sae call me at the same time. “Katniss!”

There’s a strange look on their faces before Sae’s eyes dart down towards my tail, then she looks at me with raised brows. I look down and see the pattern glowing: bright, brighter, dim. I concentrate to still my body until it stops completely.

Prim giggles and Sae reminds me, “Your marriage is important for the future of many lives.” I don’t know why she’s reminding me of that when I understand full well just how important who I marry will effect so many lives, most importantly my own. It may be my only way back to life above water. And then my eyes wander back to the entrance, and I realize that the glow may have broadcast my interest in my guard.

“I understand, Sae,” I tell her. From the way her brows are slightly drawn together and her lips pressed tightly, it’s clear my response doesn’t put her mind at ease.

“Very well. It’s time for Gale to guide you through the city, isn’t it?” I nod a little more enthusiastically than I wouldn’t liked, but thankful she’s let the topic go, or so I think. “Yes, well, I think it would be good for Prim to go with you. She should have her time outside as well.”

Although I love my time with Prim, we’re kindred spirits both having lost our families, the excitement I felt in anticipation of my tour of the city with Gale has lost its luster. I concentrate fully to avoid a glow from my tail displaying my disappointment because I don’t want to hurt Prim who is absolutely ecstatic about Sae’s idea. That much is clear from the beaming smile on her face to the glowing of her tail. I take a mental note of its pattern: bright, dim, bright, dim because I’m sure of what emotion it corresponds to.

* * *

Prim holds my hand as we swim through the Hob, pointing with her free hand at everything she wants to show me, everything she finds that interests her. Gale trails behind us and hasn’t said a word since we told him Prim was coming with us. When Prim isn’t looking, I turn back to see him staring at us, at me.

I’m annoyed with Sae, but I’m not annoyed or angry with Prim. I love my time with her; she’s like the little sister I always begged my parents to have when I was young and my parents were still alive. With Prim, I sometimes feel like that smiling little girl who still had a loving family. The girl where hugs and hand holding came easy. I always figured that girl died not long after my parents, but here I am. When Prim needs comfort, I don’t hesitate to hold her. Through the Hob, I don’t mind holding her hand.

Our closeness, as quickly as it’s come, left me with a question. “Do you miss your sister?” I asked her once, wondering if she resented me replacing her sister. How could anyone replace a sister?

“I miss her,” Prim says to me, “but not as much as you’d think. We were like strangers; she never wanted to spend time with me.”

“Why not?” I asked, going against my instinct not to pry.

“Because she didn’t like me much. She thought of me as a burden and avoided me whenever she could which was always. You’re not like that. You spend time with me, and I feel connected to you somehow.”

How could anyone not love Prim? She’s so sweet and kind and always helpful. When I think about returning to land, I know it’ll be her that I miss the most.

We stop at a vendor with his wares of seaweed bundles dangling and floating around him as Prim points to each, describing how they taste and what their medicinal uses are. It was one of our talks in my chamber where she confessed that her mother taught her some healing remedies before her death, that the other Katniss had no interest in it.

I can’t say I do either as my neck twists just far enough for Gale to come into view. He’s floating closer to where Prim and I are.

“Katniss,” Prim calls and nudges me in my ribs with her elbow, wondering where my attention has drifted off to just as Gale floats to my side. His body heat warms the water between us, and without thinking, I drift closer to it, drawn to it. There’s a strong urge to reach out and touch him, to feel the source of the warmth, but even I know how inappropriate that would be.

Prim tilts her head towards us, her eyes flitting from him to me, and then focuses her attention on the vendor and his seaweed. There are several bundles in her arms by the time she proclaims very loudly, “Well, I guess I should take these back to my chamber. I’ll see you for the meal, Katniss.” She nuzzles her cheek against mine because her arms are too full to give me a hug, and then cuts through the water until all I can see is her large fins fan out into a cloud of soft pink, disappearing in the distance.

“I guess she really had to get them to her chamber,” Gale says to me with the equivalent of a small chuckle. His eyes dart to the side and to the stony, uneven ground below, and finally up at me. They are so clear and so blue that I find myself staring a little too long before I have to look away.

We drift through the Hob together but don’t say a word and look at anything but each other for so long that it becomes uncomfortable. I want to say something, but there’s nothing that comes to mind except for one question. Before doubt and fear can stop me, I force it out. “Do you have family?”

Gale looks at me and then drops his gaze. “Yes,” is all he says, stopping in front of a jewelry vendor although his silver tail swishes from side to side slowly.

I don’t say anything more, but I watch and wait for him to twist the knife by telling me how beautiful his wife is, how adorable his children are. I knew he had to have a family somewhere out there, and yet, I’d hoped that he didn’t.

He rubs the pearl-like stone dangling from a necklace before twirling his finger underneath so that it creates a vortex in the water. The necklace spins for some time even after he stops.

“Two brothers and a sister,” he finally says and then adds, “You’re not like the other Katniss.”

The small fins at my hips flutter wildly to keep my in place as a soft current in the water, much like a breeze on land, passes through. The comment seemed to come from nowhere and surprises me so much that I forget to be relieved he hasn't mentioned a wife, a lover or children. “How am I different?”

“She never asked me about my family. The other Katniss was never interested in the family of the guardsmen and women. She never wanted to speak to anyone but Sae and those she deemed worthy.”

“And me?” I ask, almost afraid to know his answer, sure that he’ll mention how clumsy I am when it comes to understanding the world down here or the way I swim.

But his answer is gentle and sincere when he says, “You care.”

* * *

“Sae!” Johanna’s throaty call resonates inside my chamber as I have my meal with Sae and Prim. She snakes through the entrance quickly with Gale behind her. “We have guests!”

Our food floats in the center of where we sit to be plucked as we eat. There’s krill and seaweed and a tough-to-chew kelp that Sae assures me is good for me. My finger’s on a particularly plump krill by the time Johanna’s reached us. “Who is it?” the elder woman asks, but by the look on her face, she seems to know.

“It’s Coriolanus and his son, Cato. They’ve come for an answer.”

I freeze at the names, recognizing them as the leader of Silver and his second son. I’m not sure what to do so I do nothing and watch Sae for her reaction. She inhales, the gills behind her ears shuddering as she finishes whatever it is she’s eating at the moment before telling Johanna, “We’ll meet him in the large chamber.”

Johanna nods and glances my way before leaving. I’m not sure, but I think her expression isn’t as hard as it’s been when she looks at me. Gale’s focus shifts towards me for a moment before he follows.

“Prim, we’ll have to prepare her for Coriolanus,” Sae says, already unraveling the braid I wear to the side as Prim disposes of what’s left of our meal. Sae doesn’t say it, but I know she’s thinking it because I am. This is it. This is the moment where I must use everything I’ve learned to make Coriolanus believe I’m Katniss. If he has any inkling that I’m an impostor, he will set his sights on a marriage between his son and Prim. I can’t allow that.

The older woman is a blur of gray hair and orange fins around me, combing her fingers through my hair as she styles it in some style that’s tight against my scalp. I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing, feeling the tickle as water rushes in and out of the gills behind my ears. I try to reassure myself that I know enough to fool Coriolanus, that I can do this, but it’s no use. My nerves are frayed and I can feel that slight tingle under my skin whenever my lights start to glow. It’s just as I suspected when I open my eyes to find my tail flashing an erratic pattern.

Prim returns to the chamber with some concoction of paste that hasn’t dissolved in the water, smearing it on my face and torso. When she attempts to smear it over my breasts is when I snatch it from her. I understand that for them breasts are no different than shoulders or elbows, but no matter how much I try to adjust to their way of life, there are some things I will never be able to adjust to.

The paste feels heavy against my fingers, but it’s creamy along my skin and makes it sparkle and shine against the slightest light.

Sae’s bombarding me with questions, quizzing me to make sure I know all of the basics I need to know for meeting the leader of Silver. She’s afraid that I’ll slip; I’m afraid that I’ll slip, but I can’t. I can’t allow him to know that I’m only a replacement for the real Katniss.

When Sae’s done with me, she and Prim lead me to my chamber’s entrance but not before I’m able to chance a look at my reflection. The way the cream makes my skin sparkle is nothing short of amazing. Along with my hair wrapped and weaved into a tight crown on top of my head, I look regal…I remind myself that it’s Katniss who looks regal because this is her face and body.

Gale’s floating by the entrance of my chamber, waiting to escort us into the large chamber where Coriolanus and his son are waiting. The room’s twenty times the size of my chamber and I’ve only been in it twice in the two months I’ve been here.

Sae and Prim stop before they enter the large chamber, but I drift inside slowly with Gale close behind me. I’ve never been so relieved to have him shadowing me until this very moment because I’m not sure what I would do if I had to meet these men by myself.

Inside, it’s easy to spot them. The elder man is about Sae’s age with a cloud of white hair fanning out around his head and covering half his face. His lips are red and puffy, stretching widely in an almost friendly welcome if not for the cold eyes above them. His white tails swishes from side to side in a rhythmic motion that reminds me of an old grandfather clock.

The man next to him is a younger version with the same cold eyes. His hair isn’t white but more of a wheat color, short, and there’s no hair on his face. This man doesn’t bother to smile at me or pretend that this is a friendly visit, and I like it that way. It’s better when your enemy is simply your enemy.

I continue to drift closer to the center of the chamber and give them a hearty, “Welcome,” as Sae instructed me to do. Coriolanus eyes me carefully before the smile spreads even wider, “Thank you, Katniss. It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s been so long,” I say with a forced smile of my own. According to Sae and Prim, the other Katniss hadn’t seen them in well over three moons. “Yes, it has,” Coriolanus nods to me, but then his head tilts to the side and the two men share a look between themselves before they look at me again.

“I’m afraid we’re here more for business than for pleasure…the lingering matter of you and my son?” Coriolanus’s voice is so gentle and pleasant that I almost believe that he is those things. Almost.

Cato’s cobalt eyes are hard on me, refusing to look away even when Sae offers him food to eat. I don’t like the way he looks at me, the flicker of something behind his eyes that hints of violence and hatred. Still, I can’t help myself when I ask him, “Are you still interested in this arrangement?”

I’m not sure why I ask, perhaps to see his face do something other than stare at me. And just like that, as though someone had flipped a switch, he’s smiling at me as amiably as his father. “Of course, Katniss. I think we could be very good for each other. Don’t you agree?”

I may not have been born to this world, but I know it wouldn’t be a good idea to insult them outright, and Sae’s stiff body behind Cato, staring at me with a pained expression is an additional warning. It takes me a moment, but then I settle on an answer.

“I can’t deny that a union between the Cities of Silver and Fire would be beneficial for all involved, but it is a very important decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. I think I’ll require some more time.” From what Sae tells me, at face value the union is beneficial for both cities. Our city has an abundance of rock and shell used as building materials to trade with the other cities, but our city’s food stores are low. Lava rock is fertile ground to grow various seaweed, but it’s hard to work when the lava constantly flows. The City of Silver is always expanding and building and has an abundance of food. A match made in heaven if not for the stories of Coriolanus and his sons.

Sae expels a breath as the amiable smile vanishes from Cato’s lips, and his brows dip down low. He’s about to say something, perhaps to tell me that he won’t give me the time I need, but his father speaks instead, cutting off anything he had to say.

“Of course, dear Katniss, but please keep in mind we cannot wait forever. Soon we may find it more beneficial to explore other options.”

Cato flicks his white tail and floats my way, but Gale positions his body beside and slightly in front of me, blocking the space between me and Cato. His eyes are narrowed on Cato, but mine are on Coriolanus. Cato doesn’t make anymore sudden moves, slowly drifting towards me until he takes my hand between the two of his. Gale’s eyes are on Cato, Cato’s focus is divided between me and Gale, but Coriolanus and I watch each other carefully. The elder man eyes me as thought there is something he’s trying to work out before he calls his son to leave.

I didn’t realize I’d held my breath until they leave the chamber completely and I exhale, the whooshing of water rushing out of my gills.

Gale whips around and takes my hands into his, startling me with his movements and his closeness. “Are you okay?” Whatever it is inside me that makes the clicks, squeaks and squeals of their language has left me, and all I can do is nod. He immediately releases my hand when Sae comes to me and Prim rushes into the chamber. I’m glad Sae didn’t allow her to enter. I don’t Prim anywhere near those men.

Her little arms wrap around me, burying her head into my abdomen. I feel numb, but I hold her for my own comfort.

Coriolanus and his son have left me with even more dread about that option than I had with only Sae’s warnings. The third son of the Setting Sun is my only hope, but judging by Coriolanus’s words after only three moons, there’s no way I can wait another four for his decision. With new resolve, I know what I have to do. My tail glows with my mounting frustration. Whether it’s to the second son of Silver or the third son of the Setting Sun, it’s clear I’ll have to marry, and soon.

I never have any say in my life and I’m tired of it. Above the surface, I was considered a minor and dumped in the care of my aunt. Below, I’m forced into a marriage if I have any hope of fulfilling the original Katniss’s dying purpose and returning to all that I’ve known.

I float upward until I have enough room to straighten myself vertically to give some semblance of authority. Prim pulls away from me and looks up with wide eyes as I say, “I don’t want to wait another three moons for him to make his decision. I’ll go to the City of the Setting Sun and demand that he see me.”

Prim looks up from her spot near the floor with her wide eyes even wider in awe. Sae’s expression I don’t know how to decipher but I figure the partial smile she’s trying to hold back is something positive. Even Gale’s looking at me, with the same curiosity he had when they first found me. This is something they need to get used to because I have to do something. I can’t have my life chosen for me. I don’t want the world to tell me where I’m going to end up. The third son of the Setting Sun sounds like my best option, and I have make him see that I’m the best option for him as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feed a muse. Leave a comment.


	5. So Far and So Close

Sunlight begins to filter through the water while we float at the edge of the city waiting for something. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m not sure I want to know with everyone around me bellowing in such a low pitch. The sound is ominous and wracks my already tightly strung nerves even tighter. We’re going to the City of the Setting Sun so that I can demand to speak with the third son.

I have no idea what I’m going to say to him other than I’m at his mercy, that my only other option is Cato. Would it be wise to share the rumors about Coriolanus and his sons? Or does Peeta already know what people say about the strange death of Coriolanus’s wife or the stories of his sons’ penchant for inflicting bruises and scars? I’m so nervous that I feel the control over my lights fading until a hand slips around mine.

My first thought is that it’s Prim, but the hand is much larger and Prim is still within the city walls, something that didn’t go over well with her at all.

I look down to find the solid hand around mine and follow up the muscled forearm and bicep…Gale. His blue eyes lift to meet mine; he gives me a warm smile and my hand a gentle squeeze that immediately calms my nerves to something more manageable.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he tells me. To my disappointment, he lets go of my hand and removes one of the two satchels from his shoulder, slipping it over my head so that it rests across my chest. It’s made of a thin material that’s smooth to the touch but feels strangely sturdy; everyone around us carries one.

Something in the distance catches the attention of Johanna and the other guards as they scan the water. It’s a massive shadow that only appears larger as it comes closer, and there’s an excitement that grows with it from those around me.

Some of the guards remove cords from their satchels, Johanna’s the first among them. Their muscles are tense and ready with all of their concentration on that ever-growing shadow, as their cords sway from side to side in anticipation. Not only is there a smile that’s just barely there on the often scowling face of the leader of the guards, but it threatens to spread wider.

It’s only now that I see the shadow isn’t a shadow at all, but several individual ones, small and round, dotting the water. I’m not sure how dots will help us get to the other city, and I’m ready to ask Gale or Sae that very question before the little shadows come even closer and better to see.

They’re speeding towards us, large fish with the tops of their mouths tapering into long points. They swim through the water at an incredible speed; I’m almost afraid that they’ll swim right through us, skewering us with the sharp points of their snouts, but no one around me moves. I can only guess that they know something I don’t, so I decide to stay in my place.

Surprisingly, the large fish slow down as they come closer, practically swimming right up to us. The tall fins along their backs are a deep blue that spreads halfway down their bodies to where a gentle orange begins and disappears somewhere around the underside of their bellies. I reach out to touch the closest one, and it doesn’t move away. My fingers gently follow the spindles of its tall, fan-like fin that runs the length of its back, following the bumps and ridges that span from it’s head almost to the end of its tail. “They’re so beautiful,” I say to myself, but Gale hears me anyway.

“I’ve always thought so, too.” He gives the side of the fish I’m touching a small rub before he fastens straps around it quickly. In fact, several fish are harnessed with similar straps while the others continue to drift freely. There’s a part of the harness dangling down in a loop that Gale hands to me, but Johanna’s voice behind me gets my attention.

“Well, this is your first riding lesson,” she says, making a show of how she grips the strap of the fish closest to her. The excitement radiating from her makes her seem child-like, friendlier somehow.

“Johanna loves riding the sailfish,” Gale says to me as he gently wraps the slick leather—clearly the same material as the satchel, but thicker—around my wrist before positioning my fingers. He gives me a reassuring smile after I grip them tightly and stare at the fish I’m now tethered to.

“You’ll be fine. Just let the fish do the work,” he tells me, but it makes no sense. I look around, hoping to get some kind of hint as to what I’m going to have to do, but all I see are fish and the people that are tethered to them. As far as I can tell, everyone is assigned a fish, while the unharnessed fish drift around us lazily.

Below us there are three of these sailfish linked in a line and tethered to a contraption that Sae swims into. It looks safe and comfortable and I’m sure less complicated than being strapped by the wrist which makes me wonder why I’m not in it with my mentor. I lift my head to ask Gale that very question, but he’s disappeared from my side.

Johanna shouts at me to hold the tether tightly before giving her order to the guards ahead of her. It sounds more like a siren that words, even for their language. The fish far ahead of us immediately begin to flick their tails into action and move forward, building speed from the moment they started, while those in back of them begin to move. My fish, and those near me continue to do nothing but float with their tail fins leisurely swaying from side to side waiting for our turn as the middle of the procession.

I chance a quick glance behind us to find Gale tethered to the fish right behind me and Johanna. I don’t have time to look forward again before the leather snaps at my wrist and I’m being pulled through the water at a speed that I can manage. It’s the equivalent to jogging on land, not my fastest but definitely not my slowest. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for the speed to reach beyond what I could ever achieve on my own. Water whips at my face and body, and there’s a burn a the juncture of my arm and shoulder as though it may be ripped apart. I want to cry out from the pain, but one glance to my side at Johanna with her eyes hard on me and her brows deeply furrowed helps me keep it in. I can’t concentrate on any one thing around me as it all whirls in and out of my field of vision because I’m spinning uncontrollably. Johanna, Sae’s contraption, the surface, Johanna, Sae’s contraption, the surface. I pull at the tether and watch my fish’s tail whip in front of me, spinning until it looks like nothing but a blur. I spin helpless behind my fish, but one glance in back of me, even as distorted as his face may be to me, seeing him reminds me of his words: “Just let the fish do the work.”

And so I do. I don’t try to swim but let my muscles relax as best I can. The spinning slows until I stabilize on my side and my body naturally waves through the water in time with the fish I’m tethered to. The water is no longer fighting me but rushing over my body, working with me.

It’s freeing to move through the water so quickly and not have to work at it, giving me time to really see what’s around us. Closer to the surface, there are seven dolphins traveling together, but two of them are playing, weaving around and around each other in a beautiful, energetic dance. I watch them and imagine myself swimming in that dance, and for some reason, my partner is Gale. Even when the dolphins are too far to watch anymore, I daydream about it.

Ahead of our procession is a mass of deep indigo that shifts out of the way, and as we pass by, I can see each individual fish inside the school. Each one is a slick indigo reflecting what little light there is this far under water.

Since I’ve been in this world, I’ve only seen the beauty of the City of Fire, but outside of the city has a beauty all its own.

My head whips around, my eyes can’t focus quickly enough to take it all in. I look in back of me to see Gale who’s staring at me. There’s a small smile on his face and something else in his eyes that I can’t place.

I turn to my side to see Johanna looking at me as well. There’s a slight smirk at her lips before she gives me an approving nod and turns her attention ahead of us. Approval from Johanna…high praise.

* * *

We stop when the sun disappears completely from the water. For us, there’s only a subtle difference between day and night, but it’s enough to signify the end of our travel for now.

We’re close to a thicket of seaweed rooted in an outcropping of stone and the tops reach far above, probably close to the surface. It spans as far as I can see across, reminding me of a forest of trees on land. And just as trees sway with wind, the seaweed sways with the currents.

The contraption Sae rode in is settled on top of the bare outcropping of rock below while our fish are unharnessed and free to roam. They immediate begin to pick at the tall seaweed but don’t wander far.

Food is placed in the center of where we’re all gathered to take as needed, and for our protection, guards are posted at what I’ve come to call the six corners: the four corners as well as above and below.

Gale sits beside me as Johanna and Sae sit together close by. They’re discussing something, and I have to assume it’s about me when their eyes drift my way every so often.

I pluck kelp from the center and stuff the leathery food in my mouth. It’s hard to chew and even harder to swallow. We don’t have the tastiest choices, but it’s filling.

Even as I eat, I can’t help but watch Sae and Johanna, wondering what they have to say about me. Is it criticism for bringing them out here? For demanding to see someone that doesn’t want to see me right now? I suddenly question my decision for dragging a quarter of the city’s guard out here for my whim.

The kelp sticks in my throat even more, and I can’t bare to sit with any of them anymore. I swim away and hear a swish behind me, no doubt Gale following me. It’s his duty to stay close by for my protection.

Slowly, I weave through the seaweed forest until I can’t see the others, and more importantly, they can’t see me.

“Katniss,” Gale calls to me, but I don’t stop. I don’t want him to judge me most of all. I don’t know what I’m doing here, the realization of how the fate of an entire city, including Prim along with it, is solely my responsibility hits me hard in the gut.

“Katniss!” he calls to me again, but this time his hand is firmly wrapped around my arm and stops my forward momentum.

I can’t face him so my eyes dart from one swaying seaweed leaf to another, anything not to look at his face. “I don’t know how am I going to convince the third son that he needs Katniss when I don’t even know who she is…how am I going to finish this so I can go home?”

There’s a strange look on his face at that, as though he’s trying to figure out what to say next.

“It’s a good time to practice,” he says, surprising me from my thoughts so much that I do look at him with what must be the most puzzled look. He gives a chuckle before rifling through his satchel and looks up for a second to give me a tight smile before pulling something from it. A bow. It’s made from the same stuff as the guards’ spears, something almost like carved stone, but this is flexible enough to give just a little bit as a bow should.

He then pulls out a quiver full of arrows that he slings over his shoulder with the satchel. “Johanna wanted me to teach you. It’s as good a time as any.”

It’s a distraction from my thoughts of cities and sons and guards and responsibilities, so I jump at the chance. I snatch the thing from him along with one of the arrows in his quiver.

“Well,” he smiles, a little startled that I’m so bold, “it’s good to dive right in.”

My finger slides across the bowstring so that I can feel it’s thickness before I pull it back with two fingers. The tension is perfect, just enough give but not too much. I take the arrow and aim it for a hole in the leaf some distance away. When I release, the arrow zips through the water and through the leaf I’d aimed for. It doesn’t fly through the hole in the leaf, but I’m still getting a feel for this bow.

“Is that what you were aiming for?” he asks me. I answer, “Somewhat,” and prepare the next arrow. It takes five shots for me to get the hang of the strange bow and arrows, to hit my target with the same accuracy I’d had above, on land. “Impressive,” he compliments me, but I don’t bother to tell him that I’d taken archery classes in the last two schools I’ve been in. How would I explain that to him? The last time I tried to explain to Sae and Johanna what a school was, they kept asking me what learning skills had to do with a cluster of fish.

Fortunately, Gale simply decides that I’m a better shot that he could ever be with a bow and arrow, taking it from me. I’m not prepared for the slight tingle in my skin when his hand accidentally touches mine. He hesitates, his hands freeze in the water as his eyes level with mine. I can’t help myself. His lips look too welcoming to resist, and so I press mine against them.

There’s no response from him, and my fears flood my mind. Perhaps he’s not interested. I pull away and suddenly remember the reason why we’re in this forest of seaweed. We’re on our way to convince someone else to marry me, and here I am, kissing Gale.

I can’t bear to open my eyes and face him, wondering what he must think of me, but my eyes snap open when he asks, “Is that something they do above, on land?”

There are so many emotions that rush through me, but the one I’m aware of the most is relief. It wasn’t lack of interested or that he disapproved of my behavior. He just doesn’t know what a kiss is.

My body flushes and my lights flash for a moment before I regain control of myself and manage to answer, “Yes.”

The bow is pulled from me, and Gale returns it to his satchel as though nothing had happened a moment ago. I guess for him, nothing did happen, so I think that’s the end of it when he asks, “What does it mean to do that?”

The nearby seaweed leaf is my focus because I can’t face him again, and it’s starting to annoy me. I think of how to explain what a kiss means, and one word comes to mind. “Affection.”

“Oh,” he says as though he’s a little disappointed with my answer. “So it’s something you’d share with Prim and Sae, too?”

Everyone knows that Sae and I have built a strong friendship during my time here, and that I love Prim as though she were really my sister, but I would never kiss them the way I kissed him. At first I consider lying to him and telling him, “yes” but my gut clenches tightly at the thought. “No,” I finally answer, hoping he doesn’t ask me more, and to my relief, he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything all the way back to camp, but I think I catch him tracing his finger over his lips where I kissed him.

* * *

By our eighth camp, the wonders of the ocean have lost their appeal. I’m tired and cranky and want nothing more than to not have a fish tethered to my wrist come morning.

Everyone around me has already gone to sleep, floating with their eyes closed and bodies drifting with the mild currents. I’m floating, but I can’t sleep. For the longest, I watch the guards watching over us at their posts, alert and ready. Something nudges the back of my shoulder, and I pay no mind. Most times when groups sleep in the same space, sometimes people drift into each other. It’s when I get the nudge again that I twist my body to see Gale fully awake and not in the position for sleeping. His hand beckons me to follow him and I do, slipping and weaving through the resting bodies.

The guards watching over the camp don’t take more than a casual interest in us because I’m leaving with my personal guard; it’s his duty to protect me while it’s theirs to protect the camp.

This time, our little settlement is in the middle of open water and Gale swims out fast. It’s not too fast that I can’t follow and catch up to him easily. There’s a grin that comes across his face before he zips by me. This time I can’t match his speed. I whip my tail against the water and still fail to catch up to him, my irritation gets the better of me and I slow down.

Gale slows down, then doubles back to me. “Tired already?”

“No.” The word carries a little more annoyance than I wanted, but then I try to soften the rest, “I can’t keep up with you.”

His eyes turn downward at the darker water below us, darting towards me once or twice. “Oh. Sometimes I forget you’re not used to all of this. You just need to work on your endurance is all.”

He tilts his head in the direction that we were swimming in and says, “Come on,” not waiting for me to agree.

This time, he doesn’t swim faster than me, allowing me to set the pace of our “run.”

Swimming out in the open is a freedom I haven’t had the whole time I’ve been down here. There are no city limits to be mindful of and I don’t have to pretend to be Katniss, whoever she is. Not with Gale. He knows who I am, where I really come from, and he’s patient as he teaches me how to dip and make hard turns with him. I’m testing the limits of my tail and fins with his guidance, especially when I circle him as he swims forward.

I loop my body around him, something close to what I saw the dolphins do. I’m sure it’s no where near as graceful as their play, but I want to try it…with him. I twist my body as I swim forward and allow it to circle over him, under him, around and around. His body twists until it’s circling around me as well until we’re twining each other, spiraling in the water like the dolphins.

There’s a bright smile on his face that I’m sure matches my own and we whirl around the other at an amazing speed. His hands reach out for me and capture my waist. The spiral we’re making tightens, but our speed doesn’t diminish. In fact, his tail whips fast against the water with my tail flush against his, matching his movements. It builds our momentum, and it’s a rush I’ve never felt before.

His lights are the first to start, mine following seconds after. It doesn’t take long before they’re in time with each other as though it were one light between us.

One of his hands slides from the middle of my back up my ribs and caresses the very edge of my breast on its way to my throat, sliding back until it’s at the nape of my neck. I no longer want to look at what’s ahead of us. The blue of his eyes are more important to me at the moment as my hands explore the hard planes of his strong, wide chest before they slide over his broad shoulders. We press together tightly, fused as one as we spiral through the water.

Gale curves his body and mine automatically curves with him, slipping us upward until we break the surface of the water. I haven’t been above for so long, and the sky is full of stars I’d never noticed before, but all I can think about is being back below with him again. He sputters a few coughs as I wheeze out, “I don’t want this to ever end,” which puts a strange look on his face. It just occurs me to that I spoke in the language above water, the language of those on land.

There’s something strange about the way his chest heaves for breath, but I don’t think much of it because my eyes are focused on his which happened to be locked on my lips. The next thing I know, he dips down and his lips are on mine. They’re unsure and nervous, but it doesn’t matter because I ignore his uncertainty with my hands reaching for the back of his head, slipping through the black strands holding him to me.

I want more of him, so I trace the seam between his lips with my tongue and am rewarded with his mouth opening to me. He’s startled by the strange change in this thing I call a kiss, but it doesn’t take long for him to get the hang of it, allowing my tongue to caress his.

He moans; I whimper. Both of his arms return to my waist and tighten around me, leaving me feeling giddy, euphoric…dizzy. The world above and below the surface contract into nothing but me in his arms, his lips and tongue working so well against mine. It consumes me until my vision melts away.

We’re drifting back into the water, floating down into the deeper, darker water until we hit the bottom which must mean that this area is far shallower than other areas of the ocean that I’m used to. My vision is still hazy, and Gale comes to me with a worried expression. He strokes my arm and smiles when I focus on him. “How are you feeling?”

I blink to hopefully clear my vision and give him a weak, “I’m feeling better.” He offers me a tight smile of relief, but I can see the concern still etched in his face. He floats near me, deep in thought before he starts to scour the floor, turning over stones with the point of his spear until he plucks something round and shiny from them.

Still a little lightheaded, I pull myself from the ocean floor just in time to watch him place what looks like a pearl inside his satchel. He doesn’t give me time to swim to him, already easing himself in front of me so that he can wrap his arms firmly around my waist and pull me back to camp.

Everyone’s still asleep, but daylight will hit the water soon to wake them up. The guards watch us curiously as we pass them, Gale swimming for the both of us, but they don’t ask questions.

He helps me back into the spot where I was suppose to be sleeping, next to Sae who isn’t sleeping at all. Her eyes are wide open and on me. They flick in the direction of where Gale leaves me then back at me. Her brows are creased heavily, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m too tired to wonder why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are how you pay a fanfic author. Feedback is worth it's weight in gold.


	6. City of the Setting Sun

At the end of the ninth day, we come close to what could only be the City of the Setting Sun, and no wonder they call it that. The structures are so much like those in the City of Fire, but the setting sunlight reaches them, reflecting off of them until the spires glow a soft orange. It’s beautiful. Not the same beauty as the lava rivers of our city but breathtaking all the same.

In no time, the sailfish pull us to the edge of the city, and it’s even more impressive up close than it was from a distance. What little sunlight there is left filtering through the water dances along the iridescent surface of the structures, and each change in color more noticeable this close. I can’t help but stare as Johanna and the other guards untether the fish and Sae swims out of the contraption that carried her here. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” my mentor says, startling me out of my awestruck stupor as she moves in close to my right.

Gale takes his place close to my left but doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said anything to me since last night. In fact, I haven’t been able to coax him into looking at me since then either. His eyes are steady on what’s ahead which is a contingent of guards led by the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen on land or in the sea.

His head is covered in waves of bronze hair that match his tail exactly in color and shine. Unlike the guards following behind him—or the guards from our city for that matter—he doesn’t carry a spear strapped to his back. Instead, he carries a trident made of the same material.

My heart starts to thump in my chest and I feel the nervous tingle over my skin. Is this Peeta? Every insecurity in me bubbles to the surface of my thoughts. How can I convince _him_ to marry me?

I look to Sae for some guidance, any hint of what to do, but her expression is neutral and focused ahead. I look to Gale and am startled that his full attention is on me when I haven’t been able to get him to even look in my direction for almost an entire day. He’s studying me as though he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking, so I spare him the trouble. “How am I going to do this? How am I going to convince _him_ that a marriage is good for us both?” I speak softly so that only he can hear.

“He’s the leader of the guard, Katniss,” Gale says to me just as softly, and relief spreads through me instantly. At least for right now, I won’t have to be the saleswoman I’ve come here to be. This man is only the leader of the guard, Johanna’s counterpart for this city.

Johanna rushes to put herself between me and this man before he has a chance to get too close which makes him stop short, tail flicking at the sudden change in direction. His eyes dart between Johanna, Sae, Gale, and me as he plays with a coin between his fingers. I can see the question in his eyes before he even asks it.

“The time hasn’t passed. What are you doing here?” he asks, his eyes on me for it.

“Finnick,” Johanna says to him in the way old friends would, “we have to see him.”

The man immediately begins to shake his head which makes my heart sink. It seems to be the universal symbol for closing the door in someone’s face.

“He won’t. Peeta was adamant that it would take six moons to decide, and he won’t budge on that.”

Johanna tries to speak so that no one but this man, Finnick, can hear her—part of me wonders if she specifically didn’t want me to hear—but I do. “Finnick, things are dire,” she says to him, her body close and her voice soft.

He studies Johanna for a moment that stretches far too long for my comfort, rubbing at the smooth skin along his jaw before sighing. At the last moment, his eyes dart in my direction before returning to her. “The best I can offer is for you to see Haymitch.”

I don’t recognize that name, but I take the relieved smile from Sae and the nod from Johanna that they do, that this is a reasonable concession.

Finnick and his guards lead us inside the city, inside the largest circular entrance of the city’s walls and through long winding tunnels and corridors. It reminds me so much of when I was first taken to the City of Fire; it even has to surreal feel to the whole situation as though it’s too strange to be real.

The end of our journey leads us to a large chamber much like the one in our city where we’re told Haymitch is coming. Johanna and Finnick speak softly to each other beyond where we can pick up the sound of their voices, as Sae, Gale, and I float and wait. The large chamber is so much like ours that I feel a twinge of familiarity with the curved walls, several entrances, and vaulted ceiling, but unlike ours, there’s an elevated section recessed high above us. It’s closed in by a fence carved from the wall itself. It looks almost like a balcony, but for beings who can swim anywhere, what use would they have for one?

A man enters the chamber, his black hair streaked with silver and his face haggard. Gray eyes land on me immediately, but then right before he reaches us, they dart in the direction of Finnick, his brows dipping down low. Finnick does nothing but give him a shrug in response, and so the older man’s gaze returns in my direction.

“Not taking care of yourself, old man?” Sae says to him, drawing his attention away from me. As his brows dip down further, I fear Sae may have offended him, overstepped her bounds, until a hint of a smile cracks his face.

“Old man, huh? Don’t have any mirrors in that city of yours, Sae?”

The two embrace like old friends and my gills release a full breath, but the next breath is taken from me when he rushes towards me suddenly. I think he might attack me, but then its clear that he wasn’t focusing on me at all. It was on the person next to me: Gale.

Haymitch embraces Gale very much the way he did with Sae but with more affection, and releases him to size him up. “How are you, my boy?”

Gale rubs the back of his neck, a flush of red crops up from there, spreading all the way to his cheeks. The muscles of my face tighten, and there’s no doubt I’m frowning. I have every right to be. Somehow Gale has a connection to this Haymitch as well.

While the two continue to talk, Sae nudges me and speaks softly enough for only me to hear, “Gale is Haymitch’s son, Katniss. Haymitch comes from our city, but his son comes from here. He asked us to allow Gale in the guard so that he could experience the city of his father.”

“Who is this Haymitch, anyway?”

“He’s the mentor of the first, second, and third sons of this city.”

My eyes shift to the father and son. Haymitch is Sae’s counterpart here, and therefore would have much more sway with Peeta than I thought. I don’t have a lot of time to think about that before the two men have finished their reunion and Haymitch’s attention is on me.

“So what brings all of you here, Sweetheart?” The tone of the sounds and the look on his face make me think that he calls me this not as a term of endearment. In fact, if lemons grew down here, I’d think he’d just sucked on one.

It’s the moment I’d come here for. I ignore the prickle of nerves that spreads over my skin and straighten my body. “I’m here to speak with the Third Son of your city,” I say as I’ve rehearsed in my head several times with the proper amount of authority. I don’t want them to think that this is a request because I don’t have time for requests. “I’m here to speak with Peeta.”

“Hmm,” is the only sound Haymitch makes, but some movement above us catches my eye. There’s someone at the balcony area, but all I can see is some blond hair floating above a head in the water. “Well, I’m sorry you’ve traveled all this way for nothing, but he’s given us explicit instructions. He will not see you until he’s decided with the last three moons.”

The blond hair at the balcony starts to retreat. My only opportunity’s slipping through my fingers, and a panic bubbles from my stomach and up my throat, causing me to call out in desperation. “Your city’s in danger too. If I marry Cato, Coriolanus will have the power of two cities behind him. He won’t stop there and you know it!”

Haymitch’s tail glows. I don’t recognize the pattern, and strangely, I don’t think he makes any effort to stop it. Bright, dimmer, dimmest, nothing. Bright, dimmer, dimmest, nothing.The guards of this city inside the chamber swim towards me, and before they reach me, Johanna and Gale float until they position themselves in between. The guards are confused by the barrier and look to Finnick first, but he’s looking to Haymitch for guidance.

The older man gives me a hard stare, but then his eyes slide up towards the balcony before they land back on me. He’s waiting for something, perhaps waiting for Peeta to say something from the balcony above. The longer we remain in silence, Johanna’s face twists into a scowl that could easily rival my own. Sae’s eyes, like mine, are focused on the figure at the balcony while Gale’s eyes close tightly. With every second to pass without a sound, we’re given the answer to my plea, it’s just not the answer we wanted.

“I’m sorry, Katniss. I really am,” Haymitch says to me, with a tone more sincere than before. “Take care of yourself, my boy,” he says to Gale, giving his son one last embrace before leaving the large chamber.

We’re escorted out, but I glance up at the balcony just before we leave, catching a pair of blue eyes staring down at me. They belong to a very handsome face, haloed by blond hair. He watches us leave with a curious look until I can’t see him anymore.

“Peeta isn’t much for talk,” Sae says to me softly enough for only me to hear.

* * *

We leave; I’m exhausted and defeated and all I want to do is rest, but I have over a week more of being pulled by sailfish with nothing to show for it. Haymitch is kind enough to give us better provisions than the kelp we’ve brought, but that’s little consolation. I’m running out of time. The thought of marrying Cato makes my insides twist and churn. And then there’s Prim. Even if I were to marry Cato just so that I can return to land, what about little Prim? I can’t leave her in the hands of that man.

Sae plucks kelp from the center of camp. There are several that are bulbous and juicy and her choice is particularly plump. “Perhaps this is a sign Peeta is considering the marriage,” she says to me just before she begins to chew it. From the tone of her voice and the neutral expression she carries, I don’t think she believes her own words.

At the other side of my mentor, Johanna floats quietly. Although she’s not that much of a talker, the leader of our guard tends to say what’s on her mind, but this evening the only communication she gives is the tension in the muscles around her face, and her eyes flicking up at me a few times as though something in her thoughts causes them to do it.

Gale’s the same. He chews quietly as he floats close beside me, his eyes staring off into the dark, far-reaching ocean ahead of him, but once in a while, I catch them glancing my way before they quickly return forward. Johanna’s silence unnerves me, but Gale’s irritates me, annoys me in a way that makes me restless until I’ve had my fill and turn towards him, ready to confront him. My mouth is partway open when something in the distance catches our attention.

There are several mermen swimming towards us, and Gale is the first to react, quickly bringing his body closer to mine but in front of me. They’ll have to go through him just to see me.

Johanna turns quickly at his reaction and notices them as well, but for her, she gathers the closest guards to us to add more obstacles in their path between me and them.

The strangers come closer, but one pulls forward from the rest. “We are guards of the Setting Sun,” he announces to Johanna, loud enough so that the entire camp can hear. I’m sure that’s for my benefit. “The third son of the Setting Sun wishes to speak with the first daughter of Fire,” the merman says, his neck straining to get a glimpse of my location.

“Well, let’s see it,” Johanna folds her arms across her chest and eyes them carefully. Around my arm is Gale’s vice grip as the mermen look amongst themselves as though they have no idea what she’s asking for.

And the next thing I know, I’m being pulled through the water quickly. I try to fight Gale’s grip, but it’s tight around my arm, and he doesn’t stop until we’re enough of a distance away from our camp that we can barely see them. He doesn’t think to release me, but then again, I don’t wait for him to, wrenching myself free from his grip.

“Why’d you do that? They were going to take me to the third son, to Peeta!”

He’s shaking his head as he slowly floats backwards until his back presses against the rocky surface of a mountain. “Those weren’t guards of the Setting Sun, Katniss.”

“How do you know that?”

“Johanna was asking them for their token, what the guards of the Setting Sun are given for each assignment. It was put in place when—” he begins to explain as I float closer to him to hear more about this, but we’re interrupted by something whizzing by my head. In that very second, Gale wraps his arms around me and plunges us both down towards the base of the mountain, into the deep water where it’s always dark and hard to see, where sun and moonlight never reach. I hear voices, loud and angry, calling for me. None of them sound familiar, but I can’t see anything more than Gale’s broad chest that my face is nestled in.

Gale’s tail snaps against the water, turning our bodies in different directions.

It’s taken me a while to adjust the the murky concept of up and down here underwater, but in this single moment I’m lost again. I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. For all I know, we could be speeding towards the ocean floor.

But having Gale’s arms around me is familiar and feels “right,” so I close my eyes that are all but useless at this point and wrap my arms around his neck, securing my body close to his. My tail flushes tightly against his to mimic his movements and I’m no longer a burden that he’s dragging through the water but I’m helping our momentum. I feel the water glide over my body as we speed through the water.

I don’t know how long we keep this pace, but Gale finally slows his tail’s movements, therefore slowing mine until we come to a gradual slop. I’m aware of what came close to my head, the very thing that launched Gale into action the second time. It was an arrow, and if I hadn’t moved closer to Gale that very moment, I would be dead right now.

He knows that as well. I see it in the way his eyes carefully examine me from head to fin, the way he presses his hand to the side of my face as though he wants to assure himself that I’m, in fact, still alive and with him.

My heart’s pounding in my chest, but his thumb caressing the skin of my cheek causes an erratic rhythm. If I let myself, I could get lost in the blue eyes that are staring into mine, but I can’t. “We have to go back…for Sae, for Johanna!”

“Johanna will see to their safety because that’s her duty. It’s mine to protect you,” he tells me and levels his eyes with mine, waiting for me to acknowledge what he’s said. In response, I nod just a little, just enough to let him know I understand but not enough that I agree fully.

“Katniss, there’s something I—” he starts, releasing me from his arms, but something whizzes between us. Another arrow. And then another.

Mermen are rushing towards us, speeding through the water and getting closer by the second. Gale reaches for the first thing he can grab on me and that’s my wrist. We’re rushing through the water again, but no where near the speed we could if we were able to swim as one. Whoever our attackers are, they’re bridging the distance quickly until they’re practically on top of us.

Gale reaches for his spear with his free hand, but I don’t have time to go through the satchel to get the bow and arrows, realizing how foolish it was to keep it in there in the first place.

A spear from one of our pursuers cuts through the water, slicing Gale’s tail at the outer edge. It’s a huge gash that releases large tendrils of red in the water. No longer able to maintain his fastest speed, we slow and the mermen after us bridge the gap even more. We’re deeper in the water than I'm used to, so I take him by the wrist and swim higher, up the mountain range until I find a forest of seaweed growing at the mountainside. It won’t hide us for long, but it will at least buy us a few more minutes.

I weave use through the swaying foliage, and find the mouth of a small cave. Either I can go inside it and trap us between these mermen and a wall of stone, or try our luck with swimming for our lives. With all of the blood in the water, we don’t stand a chance swimming. Besides the mermen, there’s a really good chance of a shark picking up the scent of the blood.

The cave is just as small as I thought, barely enough for us to squeeze through, but we do.

“Katniss,” Gale says as he reaches for his spear, “you’re going to have to leave me before they find this cave.”

I’m shaking my head, but he’s shaking his just as stubbornly. “You have to.”

“I won’t.”

Gale shakes his head even more as though he will drown out any dissension I will have, and in that moment, I know I’ll never be able to convince him. “I need the bow and arrows,” I tell him as I snatch his satchel from his shoulder and rummage through it for what I need.

“Good! You’re right. You’ll need it,” he nods approvingly before pulling his spear from its hold on his back. “I will go out first, lure them away from you. Take my satchel with you and tell Johanna—”

Whatever it was that he wanted me to tell Johanna was lost when I hit him in the back of his skull. He drifts there in the water as I use the silence to think. My mind works overtime as my eyes scan my environment for anything that could help us, but there’s nothing be rocks and shadows. In the corner is one particularly dark shadow that piques my curiosity, so I investigate and find a small tunnel. For all I know, it could lead to nowhere, but even nowhere would buy us a few more minutes of life.

It’s barely large enough to swim in, but I manage somehow with Gale in tow. Alone with my thoughts, the guilt settles in. I didn’t want to hit him, but I couldn’t think of any other way to keep him from sacrificing his life to save mine. If we live though this, I won’t mind if he wakes up angry with me, so long as he has the opportunity to wake up.

We reach the end of the tunnel at the same moment I hear voices again. They’re at the entrance and coming closer, but my attention is more on the chamber the tunnel’s led us to. It’s not very big, but what’s more important is that there is no water. The entire chamber is one big pocket of air, and I break the surface and close my gills to take the in air directly. I cough a little, but have no problem breathing which means there’s enough oxygen, so I pull myself up and out of the water. That’s when it comes back to me. When Gale and I broke the surface of the ocean that night, he was breathing differently because he wasn’t breathing with his gills.

To test the theory, I pull him out of the water with me and use my tail and free arm to slide us in the shallow water as far from the tunnel as I can inside the chamber. He’s choking, gasping to breathe, and it hits me that I was wrong to do it. He either can’t breath in air, or he has to be conscious to make the switch. Either way, I’ve condemned him to death by suffocation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A comment a day keeps the writer's block away!


	7. A Need to Breathe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you upset over the whole G/K vs P/K, all I can say is that patience will be rewarded.

The voices in the water are little more than echoes of sound in the chamber, but that doesn’t change how close I can tell that they are, now. I gather Gale close so that his head rests on my tail as I coil it close and press my back against the chamber wall.

He’s coughing out water as one head bobs up to the surface where the tunnel is, and a merman lifts out of the water to his shoulders. He finds us immediately, and all I can do is will myself to breathe as I involuntarily pull Gale as close to me as I can, making sure to keep him on his side. I watch the merman’s gills flutter until they start to shudder in an inconsistent rhythm. In a panic, his hands reach for them before he slips back below the water.

Others try, but the same thing happens each time. They have the ability to breathe above water, Gale’s proof of that, but none of them know how at the moment, and it’s the only thing keeping us alive.

The water near the tunnel grows silent, so there’s some time for me to relax a little, enough time to take care of Gale who’s stopped spitting out water. His breaths are even and steady. I caress his hairline, noticing how dull his hair looks, and his eyes flutter open for a moment before they close again. I close my eyes and continue to stroke his hairline as I start to remember a song my father sang to me.

I hum and in my mind I can hear his golden voice as clear as though he were right here in the chamber with us. The humming isn’t enough to sustain the memory, so I close my eyes and start to sing the words, imagining that I’m singing with him like I did when he was alive. It’s like I have him here with me again.

There’s a slight shift on my tail and I open my eyes to find the bluest blue staring at me. Gale’s awake, and there’s something in his expression that makes my skin tingle and my heart flutter. His hand reaches up to touch my face, the tips of his fingers feathering the line of my jaw to my chin. I want to kiss him again, but this isn’t the place or the time. If I had any desire to follow that line of thought, I would realize that there shouldn’t ever be a place and time for it. I’m to marry one of two men, and neither of them are Gale.

His eyes dart around, and he lifts his head just enough to take in our surroundings: stalactites covering the ceiling, smooth stone worn by water over time, the shallow water we’re sitting in. It’s so quick that the soft, gentle expression melts into something completely different. His brows drop down into a deep furrow, his lips press tightly together, and the muscles at his jaw bulge. I know what’s on his mind. “I had no choice,” I tell him even though I know I’m speaking in the language of the people on land, a language he doesn’t understand. “You didn’t give me a choice.”

The hard look in his eyes tells me how much he doesn’t agree. He pulls himself up from my lap with great force because he’s not used to moving through air that has much less resistance than  water. When he falls back, I reach for him to try and catch him, but above water, his solid frame is so much heavier that I fall with him.

There are some sounds from him as he tries to talk, and then he coughs and sputters. It’s impossible to speak the underwater language above water just as it’s impossible to speak the land language in the water. I learned that the hard way my first night with them.

My finger presses against his lips and I shake my head when it looks like he’s going to attempt to speak again. He doesn’t say a word, but his eyes level with mine again, and his fingers cover mine. I’m very aware of how close we are, how our bodies are pressed together, and I fight desperately with myself to think of some way to get out of here instead of kissing him.

There’s a disturbance at the surface of the water near the tunnel, and several arrows dart out of it. A couple hit the ceiling, but some curve back down close to where we are. They know our general location and are hoping they can get us by sheer luck. Unfortunately, luck is on their side because one of the arrows lands only a finger’s width from Gale’s arm. I pull myself up and immediately pull him with me. There’s no time to wait for him to become acclimated to moving through air, so I slide my tail against the stone floor—sloshing around what little water there is—and drag him along the wall, further into the chamber.

All I know is that I’m moving us as far away from them as I can, but the floor of the chamber disappears, and we drop, plunging into what seems to be a small pool of water. I loose my bearings again, but Gale, however, is back in his element. He’s swimming around me, checking me for injury, but is distracted by something. “You feel that?” he asks me but doesn’t wait for my response. Just as I can start to tell up from down again, I see him swimming around the small pool of water quickly, tapping his hands against the rock searching for something. “Can you feel it?” he asks me again.

I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Feel what?”

“Here!” he says as he holds his hand up to a dark patch in the wall, but then his hand sinks inside it. It’s not just a dark patch; it’s another tunnel. Gale grips his spear tightly and swims into it without a second thought. It’s our only hope of escape, so I follow without question. The tunnel winds and turns many times, but Gale seems to know where he’s going somehow and our only other option is back in the chamber through men determined to see us killed.

I don’t know how long we swim but it’s long enough for me to wonder if we’re just heading deeper into the mountain, to our deaths. I debate on whether or not I should ask Gale if, perhaps, we'd made a mistake when the tunnel narrows and we can't swim anymore. We're pulling ourselves through it with our hands, and just when I think I can't do it anymore, the tunnel opens to the ocean, emptying out of the side of the mountain.

Gale mentions currents as he helps me squeeze through the narrow exit and quickly checks all directions carefully. There's no sign of our attackers here, and as far as we can tell, they’re not even aware that this exit exists, so we take our bit of luck and swim away as quickly as we can.

The mountain is but a shadow in the distance when Gale can no longer swim on his own. The wound on his tail makes his movements sluggish, which makes our swimming pace little more than the equivalent to a brisk walk, and even that he can’t even manage anymore. “Leave me here.”

“Do I have to hit you on your head again?” I ask. At least he know this isn't a bluff; I will do it if I have to.

“You’re not a strong swimmer. You can’t swim back to the City of Fire with me as your burden.”

I don’t plan to, but we’re still too close to the mountain for what I have in mind. There has to be as much distance between it and us as we can manage, so I wrap my arms around his chest and pull him like he'd done with me. He’s right. I’m not a strong swimmer, nowhere near what Gale’s usually capable of, but I swim as fast as I can all the same. He tries to press his tail close to mine to mimic my movements, but the pain becomes too much for him after a few moments.

Finally, when we can no longer see the mountain, even as a distant shadow, I stop. In his eyes is a strange mixture of curiosity and something else as we're in the middle of nowhere with nothing around us and easy prey for sharks thanks to his wound. I close my eyes and try to remember how they did it, then I call out in the deepest voice I can manage. It’s the same sound as what Johanna and the guards had used to call the sailfish. I only hope there are sailfish out here to hear me and that I’m doing it the way I should.

Gale adds to it, bellowing out the same sounds now that he understands, but his hands are gripped around his spear tightly and eyes every direction around us. He’s worried, and he has every right to be. As though to prove his fears, the very thing he was afraid of comes towards us from the direction of where we’d left the mountain. The cluster of shadows carrying spears steady come closer quickly. There’s no way we can outrun them, so we prepare ourselves for our final stand with his spear and my bow with an arrow already nocked.

I pull at the bowstring, ready to release when I catch a glimpse at the spear one of them is carrying. It's not a spear at all. It’s the long, pointy snout of a sailfish. They’re all sailfish, about six of them. Gale and I both relax as we lower our weapons. “I hope you know how to navigate these things,” I say to Gale as I open his satchel and pull a set of cords out and hand them to him. I start to open my satchel and get mine when I see him nod and ready the cords to attach the harnesses and tethers.

* * *

We ride the sailfish longer than any of the other times before. During our journey from Fire to the Setting Sun, we rode from the first rays of sunlight until it disappeared from the water. This time, we’ve ridden for the rest of the night of the attack, all day and most of the night after. My arm’s tight and aching, and the joint at my shoulder and arm is burning. When Gale instructs the fish to stop, I’m so overwhelmed with relief that if I were above ground I would cry from joy.

“We’ll have to rest some,” he says, but he doesn’t unharness the fish. Instead, we’ve stopped at a small forest of seaweed where the fish nibble and we float below them with our wrists still tethered. Gale pulls a couple of leaves of the seaweed and hands one to me. It’s been almost two days since I’ve eaten, and I don’t bother to question him or complain how tough and leathery it is. It’s actually worse than the rations we had going to the City of the Setting Sun, but I chew and chew until I can force myself to swallow, just to fill my stomach.

“What did you want me to tell Johanna,” I ask him when things become quiet and settled for camp. His eyes drop down to meet mine for a half-second before they lift up again towards the fish that meander above us.

His gills are fluttering wildly with his breaths, but all he gives me is a curt, “Nothing.”

It didn’t seem like nothing. In what he thought were his last moments of life, he wanted Johanna to know something, and then it hits me. Gale’s family was raised in the City of the Setting Sun. Johanna must have lived there for a time from the way she knew Finnick. Was there something between the two of them? My stomach feels as though it’s dropped to the ocean floor.

I shouldn’t feel this way. When I first came here, I knew Gale was too handsome not to have someone. And who am I to feel this way when I’m to be married to one of two men and then immediately leave this world behind?

Gale is a friend. I should have remembered that during our trip to the City of the Setting Sun, but whatever it is between him and Johanna is a good reminder of that, now. Still, it causes me to imagine Gale and Johanna swimming together as we did. I think of them holding each other, and him testing a kiss her, and the thoughts make my stomach turn.

Desperate for a distraction from the images of those two, the one question that’s been rolling around in my brain since the cave comes to the fore. “You know how to breathe air. How?”

Gale smiles as though he’s remembering something pleasant, but then his body squirms and his face twists in pain. I wonder if his wound is causing him pain again.

“For so long, it was just me and my two brothers. My mother wanted so much to have a girl. And she finally got her wish.” There was such a long pause that I thought he wasn’t going to say more until he added, “but then she died giving us our little sister.”

My breath catches in my gills. “I’m so sorry,” I say softly. He looks at me curiously, and then seems to resolve some question in his mind. “It’s common for females to die when…” His eyes drift away as he leaves the rest to imply what obviously means childbirth. “It’s a wonder she survived three times.”

He goes on to describe his youngest sibling, but his earlier words sink into my thoughts until it’s all I can think about. _It’s common for females to die in childbirth? A wonder she survived three times?_ No matter who I must marry—even if I considered staying here for Prim and Sae and…it’s clear I cannot stay long enough for that if I want to live. But then again, did I expect to stay here long enough to have children?  So preoccupied by my own thoughts, I barely hear him say Prim’s name, but it's enough to slowly bring me back to the moment, to what he’s saying.

“What about Prim?”

He gives me a confused look before repeating his words, “My sister. She was very much like Prim. Kind and loving, but so headstrong when she wanted to be.”

There’s one word that doesn’t sit well with me. “Was?”

“She died,” he says, but the sound is off, broken. His face tightens and his lips press together before he decides to speak again. “She loved to skim the surface. We used to dare each other to see how long we could poke our heads above water. That’s how we learned how to breathe without our gills, but one day she asked me to go with her, and I told her I was too busy.” Gale’s head drops down and he winces from pain, although I’m no longer sure if its from his wound or not. “She went alone, and there was a storm. We didn’t find her until…”

I don’t push. I patiently wait for him to continue in his own time. He doesn’t really need to finish because I can guess what happened. Still, it’s obvious that he needs to get this off of his chest.

“We found her body on some jagged rocks near a shore.” The sounds he makes break in the water in almost a choking sound. “We think she may have been hit by a human ship and washed up on the rocks.” He curls his body into itself until his tail is against his face.

I’m heartbroken for him and I can't think of anything to do other than swim to him, ignoring how my tether disrupts my sailfish’s grazing, and wrap my arms around him. I feel him shudder in my arms and then he cries out, “I shouldn’t have let her go by herself.”

I gently bring my lips to his forehead, and he chokes out softly, “I miss Delly so much.” For the rest of our stay in the small forest of seaweed, I hold him close to me and don’t let go.

* * *

We finally come to the edge of the City of Fire, but we’re not prepared for what we see. There are mermen and women riding fish that aren't sailfish. They have the long, pointed snouts, but their bodies look more like sharks than the ornate sailfish, and these fish are just as agile as those fearsome predators. As I watch in shock the way the men and woman move with them, it’s clear that they aren’t tethered to their fish, but are holding on to ride them.

It's also clear that the fish aren't just for riding. One fish is directed in such a way that it whips through the water, and to my horror, slashes a guard of the city with its snout. They are weapons, large armed weapons.

I want to scream, to swim away, to go back to land, but then I think of Prim inside the city and that gives me more of a sense of purpose. I retrieve my bow and some arrows from my satchel and swims toward the city, towards the battle when I feel a strong hand grab my arm and counter my forward momentum. “Gale? What are you doing?”

“Don’t,” is all he says before he reaches into his satchel and pulls out what looks like a seashell. It’s small and spiraling into itself, and he places it on a stone outcropping and reaches for his spear. Even with what’s going on behind me, I’m curious to see why he's stopped me, what he's doing with the seashell when he brings down the butt of the spear, shattering the shell into tiny pieces.

For such a tiny thing, the moment it shatters, it releases a wave of sound that hurts my ears. I cover them but the sound is already gone. I turn back to see the city’s invaders now have their sights in our direction. Gale’s alerted them to us, and I whip around to face him.

“What have you done?” I seethe. “Are you with them?”

He looks completely taken aback by that, but I don’t have time for him to explain himself. I rush towards those coming for me with my bow and an arrow ready. I aim and manage to take one of my attackers down and then two more halfway to the city. Gale’s calling for me to come back, but I ignore him. He won’t be able to catch up to me with his wounded tail, which means he won’t be able to interfere again. He’s already betrayed me for whatever reasons he has, but more importantly, I must get to Prim.

By necessity, I quickly learn to shoot my arrows while swimming forward. I'm sure with practice i would be a different story, but my shots are not very accurate. It’s enough to get them out of my way as I push towards the city walls. To the side of me, I see several of the shark-like fish coming fast, and I freeze in place because I can’t outrun them. I'm surprised when one in my direct path stops short just before me while another continues a little farther until I hear a grunting sound in back of me. This time the fish didn't slash at a merman who had been poised to kill me but the long snout was lodged straight into the merman's chest. The rider left his fish to check the man and the snout before easing it out of the man's chest. The rider had a familiar face, the face of the man with bronze hair and a trident strapped to his back. Finnick.

I look around and see more mermen spilling into the city from the outside, and they are coming to the aid of our city’s guards. It just occurs to me to look at the merman riding the shark-like fish that stopped right in front of me, and I see the face I didn’t think I would see again. It’s the face that watched us from the balcony in the City of the Setting Sun. Peeta.

He’s come to help us. Does this mean he’s come to accept?

My gills struggle to take in oxygen as my mouth slightly parts uselessly, and I can’t move a muscle as I stare at the man atop the war fish. "Katniss," Gale calls to me and I can hear in his voice that he's in pain and very tired, but he's managed to catch up to me.

Peeta’s eyes slide from me to Gale, and then an easy smile spreads across his face. “So I guess this means you’ve decided, little brother?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fanfic authors live on caffeine and comments. Please help feed a fanfic author today!


	8. And a Need to Come Clean

_Decision?_ I twist to face Gale. _Little brother?_  
  
Gale doesn’t look at me. Instead, he nods to Peeta before he reaches inside his satchel. Eventually, he finds what he’s looking for, deep inside, pulling whatever it is out hidden in his closed hand. With the utmost care, he places his other hand above it, nestling whatever it is he’s holding between them. The top hand opens for Peeta slowly, presenting the pearl Gale had found nights ago. “We’ve married, brother.”  
  
Married? I don’t remember any ceremony for anyone. And there’s that word again…brother. I try to figure out how exactly can Gale be Peeta’s brother. Is there a fourth son of the Setting Sun I didn’t know about? How does Haymitch, as father, fit into this?  
  
Peeta’s eyebrows arch up in surprise at the offering as he swims away from the fish he was riding. I don’t miss the way he appraises me fully as he swims to Gale. Peeta doesn’t take the pearl, but claps his hand on Gale’s shoulder as he says, “From the time you brought her home until now? That’s quick work.” Gale says something back that I don’t quite catch, but whatever it is causes all joviality to drain away from Peeta’s face, replaced with narrowed, questioning eyes and lips pressed tightly together. His eyes dart in my direction as though to emphasize whatever question he has. There’s something going on here that I don’t understand as all hell’s breaking loose throughout the city. My first inclination is to demand answers, but one single thought comes to my mind and wipes all others from it: the thought of someone inside the city. “Prim!” I call out as I swim fast for the city walls.  
  
I glance back to see Gale pulled between Peeta and Finnick as they swim after me. Suddenly, a body slips behind me as smooth and quick as an eel and wraps his arms under my arms and around my chest. The feel of them is unfamiliar and intrusive, and I look in back of me to find it’s Peeta.  
  
His body against mine does not work. I don’t feel the symmetry, the absolute harmony of when Gale’s body is pressed close and his arms are around me. Every muscle in my body wants to fight against him, break free from his hold, but I resist those urges. He’s helping me swim to the city faster than I ever could on my own, so I focus on anything I can other than his touch.  
  
One thought leads to another in my head, but they’re all centered around the words “decision” and “little brother”. They leave me feeling uneasy and left with a conclusion that I’m not willing to accept at the moment, so I try to think of something else. Gale’s eyes. Yes. I could spend hours conjuring up the mental image of that particular shade of blue focused so intensely on me. A blue that happens to be the same shade as Peeta’s eyes, and the same shape eyes as well. That uneasy feeling resurfaces, and I think of how we must get to Prim to keep all other thoughts at bay. When I know that she’s safe is when I’ll demand the answers that will most likely confirm my uneasy feelings.  
  
Peeta shifts his hands to keep his firm hold on me, but his touch chafes. It feels like a violation against my body which causes me to look behind us in search of Gale—I can’t help myself—who’s being carried by Finnick the same way Peeta carries me. The guard of the Setting Sun scans all directions searching out immediate danger while Gale’s should as well, but doesn’t. His eyes are on me and Peeta, and his entire body is tense with a sense of irritation.  
  
Several mermen collect around us. Their unfamiliar faces and the way they swim defensively makes me realize that they are guards of the Setting Sun. Each time we’re attacked, a few guards break away to fight while the others close ranks. It’s efficient, and helps us reach the city without having to stop and protect ourselves.  
  
Turning to see Gale causes Peeta to have to readjust his hands on me, and again, I have to work hard to resist the urge to push away from him, to break from his touch even when I know I should succumb to it. This is the man I’ve been hoping to marry, after all, but each time I glance over my shoulder at him and see his blue eyes and strong jaw, I think of Gale. There’s no doubt that they’re related, and that uneasy feeling resurfaces.  
  
“Little brother,” I say the words to myself as the thoughts cascade from one to the other. Gale is Peeta’s brother. Gale must be a son of the Setting Sun. Gale had a decision to make. Peeta has a decision to make. Peeta…Gale…  
  
I don’t have enough time to follow the rest of that line of thoughts because we’re at the entrances of the city structures; we’re closer to Prim. Peeta releases me because I can swim on my own for this distance, but all of us stop in our place immediately at the sight of two mermen ahead of us leaving the structures. I immediately recognize the cloud of white hair. Coriolanus!  
  
Dread causes my stomach to tighten painfully wondering how long he’s been inside the city, and then I think of Prim.  
  
Even though the man’s blocking the view of his son, I can still see a pair of cold eyes fix on me which draws the attention of Coriolanus. Both men face us, and to my horror it’s clear to see what we couldn’t before: a blur of soft pink twisting and turning and flapping around like a fish does out of water. I recognize the color of the scales and the agitated mess of blond hair and my stomach plummets.  
  
“Prim!” I call out in panic and she instantly freezes to look for me, to find where I am as Cato tightens his grip around her wrist. “Katniss!” she calls out to me as she tries desperately to pull away, clawing at the hand that holds her captive.  
  
I don’t hesitate. My bow is lifted and an arrow nocked before my second full breath. My only hesitation is the sudden appearance of the sharp time of a spear at her throat.  Cato holds her in front of him with one arm and the other holds the sprea.  
  
“Let her go!” I call out to the two men as a warning, their only warning.  
  
Unfazed by the my arrow aimed at his son’s chest, a friendly smile spreads across the elder man’s face. “Ah, first daughter of Fire,” he greets me as though we’re old friends. “We were concerned. There was word you’d been attacked on your way back the City of the Setting Sun.”  
  
A question forms in my mind but I don’t ask it because I already know the answer. How did he know I was attacked on the way back from the City of the Setting Sun? It’s obvious that the attack was his doing.  
  
“Wouldn’t you want your sister protected by your betrothed, Katniss?” he say while gesturing towards his son.  
  
To hear him call Cato my betrothed makes my skin crawl and my gut twist tightly. My fingers around my bow and bowstring twitch, and I realize that he’s unnerved me enough to falter. I can’t let that happen again; I have to be ready for any opportunity to free Prim.  
  
My resolve is tested more when Gale swims beside me. I know his wounds are causing him tremendous pain, but to watch him move, you’d never know.  
  
A quick glance around, and I notice how all of the fighting has stopped. Guards from all three cities watch and wait to see how this confrontation ends. As I watch Prim try to free herself from Cato’s grip, I know I’d prefer it end with an arrow through Coriolanus and his son.  
  
“Father of Silver,” Gale addresses the leader of the City of Silver formally, his posture rigid and regal as I’ve never seen him before. His tail is curved back and his head high. He looks very formidable this way. “The second daughter of Fire does not require your protection as Katniss here,” he pauses, motioning to me, “has married the third son of the Setting Sun.”  
  
There’s no more hiding from what I knew to be true the moment the man who I thought was Peeta called Gale his little brother. Even though, deep down, I knew  the truth, hearing it in this moment rattles my very core.  
  
“Peeta,” I say the name softly to myself, but the way Gale…Peeta’s back muscles tighten, his tail stutters in its swishing back and forth, the way his head turns slightly to the side, I know he hears me.  
  
I glance to make sure that Prim is okay, but she’s stopped struggling and her bulging eyes and eyebrows raised close to her hairline reflects the degree of confusion I feel inside.  
  
The smile on Coriolanus’s face falters for only a moment before he recovers; his son, however, makes no effort to hide his rage. “This isn’t even Katniss!” He waves his hand in my general direction. “It’s an impostor. The marriage is invalid!” Cato bellows out, and I can’t breathe. I feel my gills working hard to filter oxygen, but it’s not enough. How did they know?  
  
The man who I thought was Peeta gives Gale…Peeta a look very much like the one he’d given before; one that expected an explanation. “What is he talking about, Peeta?”  
  
“I have been with my wife from the moment the request for marriage was made. I can assure you, father of Silver that this is Katniss, the woman I chose as wife. If you have proof otherwise, tell us here and now.”  
  
My body is shaking uncontrollably. It’s hard enough to process Gal…Peeta’s declaration, that he is the third son, but along with that he knows more than anyone that I’m not Katniss. If Cato and his father have proof that I’m not, he’s giving them the opportunity to tell everyone. And it’s clear that if they can prove I’m not the real Katniss, this “marriage” Peeta insists happened when it didn’t, the marriage I’ve been working towards all this time, is invalid. Prim will be made leader and she will be at their mercy.  
  
I aim the arrow again, ready to kill Cato before he can utter a word more, but I feel a hand gently reach for my arm to distract me. Finnick is at the other side of me, his green eyes imploring me to wait and see what comes next. “Have faith in him,” he says softly so that only I can hear. It’s hard to have faith in a man who’s seemingly lied to me from the first day I met him. And yet, I can’t help but trust that Ga…Peeta, whatever his name is, has our best interest at heart.  
  
Cato’s mouth opens, ready to share his proof, but then it hangs there uselessly as his brows dip down and draw together. I can see the muscles along his body tensing, and Prim whimpers as even his hands tighten with the renewed rage. If he had proof, he’s not willing to share. It could very well be that he was bluffing, but the fact that he knows the truth is bad enough.  
  
“We’re waiting,” the merman I thought was…Peeta…folds his arms across his chest with his eyes hard on Cato. His focus moves to Coriolanus with an expectant quirk of his brows.  
  
“Let the child go, Cato,” his father says softly, but we can still hear him. Cato reluctantly releases his hold on Prim who swims faster than I’ve ever seen her move. She’s curled around my waist, her face nuzzled just under my ribs and her little tail tucked in close.  
  
“It would be best if you and your son left the city, Coriolanus. I’ve traveled far and now have new sisters to acquaint myself with. It is a family affair. You understand.”  
  
For the first time, Coriolanus’s ever present pleasant smile falters and doesn’t return. The two mermen leave and their guards travel with them.  
  
“Finnick,” G…Peeta… calls for the leader of the guards of the Setting Sun, “see to it that Coriolanus and his son leave the city limits...safely.” His command has all of the authority of someone born to it, someone used to commanding guards. Is this even the same person I thought I’d come to know?  
  
Finnick nods and turns away. Just before he leaves my side completely, he elbows my arm and gives me a wink. And then he’s gone with several other guards of the Setting Sun. He was the one who reminded me to trust Peeta.  
  
“Katniss,” I hear the name I’ve become comfortable with in a voice I’ve become familiar with. Peeta is swimming towards me, but he can no longer hide the pain his wounds cause and his movements are jerky. “I want to introduce you and Prim to my brother—”  
  
“Katniss,” Prim calls me, and I look down at my waist to see her large, blue eyes hard on Peeta, her brows down deep and lips pursed.  
  
“What is it, Prim,” I ask, holding her close to me because I need her comfort just as much as she needs mine. Whatever it is she has to say, pulls her attention away from Peeta.  
  
“It’s Sae and Johanna. They tried to protect me from Cato and Coriolanus!”  
  
“Sae and Johanna?” I repeat. I’d wondered if they survived the trip back, but with everything that’s happened, wasn't time to ask about them.  
  
I don’t hesitate, rushing inside the city structures with Prim’s hand in mine and Gale, Peeta, and Finnick trailing us. I find them where Prim said they’d be. Sae is hurt with bruises swelling all over her face, but Johanna’s hurt badly with several gashes along her tail and ribs, blood clouding out in little tendrils around her.  
  
She looks relieved to see me and Prim, but more so when she spots the men behind us. “Peeta,” she says his name with relief, “you finally decided. So what took you so long?” To confirm what I’ve come to learn, she isn’t looking at the blond stranger, but at Gale who swims forward to have a better look at her injuries.  
  
“Yeah, little brother,” chimes in the blond stranger, “I’d like to know the answer to that as well. I saw you when you came home with her, how protective and close you were, and yet you still wanted to continue with this charade.”  
  
“I was selfish,” is all Gale says as he helps drape Johanna’s arms around the guards that have come for her. They’re guards from our city, I recognize them immediately, and I know they’ll take her to the healer.  
  
Sae looks just as confused as I feel. “You’re Peeta?” she asks him, her voice dripping with disbelief. “Haymitch and Johanna said you were his son.”  
  
“I asked them to do that for me,” he answers, his eyes avoiding the woman with his dull black hair clouding around him. After that, he doesn’t say anything else as though he’s waiting for something.  
  
I’m done with waiting. I’ve reached my limit, and I want answers.  
  
“You’re Peeta! You’re Peeta and you said nothing all of this time!” Without thinking, my tail is already flicking in the water until I’m face to face with him in mere moments. The guilt is in his face, in his posture, in the erratic flutter of his gills. This was what he was waiting for: my turn to demand answers.  
  
“I am, and I did,” he answers me, even though I didn’t really ask him. I already knew the answers, even if I was reluctant to admit them to myself.  
  
His hand reaches for me, but I quickly use the small fins at my hips to pull away so that he can’t touch me. The hurt look in his eyes gives me some satisfaction because at lease he’s feeling something of the hurt I’m feeling at his betrayal.  
  
“I wanted to know what kind of woman I was to marry before I made my decision. Haymitch and Johanna agreed to the idea. Johanna suggested I dye my hair to be more convincing. Squiggles helped with that.”  
  
Squiggle, his pet squid. I take a closer look at his dull hair and realize that the black is fading from his natural color. For a half second I wonder what his natural hair color is, but then a quick glance at his brother and I can guess.  
  
It all made sense, now, how his black hair dulled over time…when he was away from Squiggles.  
  
“Sae, can I speak privately with Katniss. Please?” he asks my mentor and the woman doesn’t move.  
  
“Why should I leave her alone with you, when you’ve done nothing but lie to us from the very beginning?” The older woman is angry, angrier than I’ve ever seen her since I’ve been down here underwater. At first, I agree with her that this merman is nothing of who I thought he was, but my eyes level with his again and see the blue that hasn’t changed from the day he found me as Katniss.  
  
“Sae, please give us some time,” I ask the woman, and she gives me a tentative nod before leading Prim and the blond stranger out of the large chamber.  
  
Prim is the last to leave with Sae, and before the older woman can stop her, she rounds in the water and rushes up to the merman that up until now I’d known only as Gale. She balls her little fist up and gives him a solid punch in the arm. “That’s for being Peeta all this time!” she says before joining back with Sae and leaving the main chamber.  
  
He rubs the spot where she hit him, and I feel a certain level of pride in the girl I’ve come to consider my sister. “I deserved that,” he says, his eyes barely able to hold my steady gaze.  
  
“Yes, you did,” is all I have to say to him because I think, in this case, he should be the one talking…explaining. For good measure, I fold my arms across my chest and wait for just that.  
  
“Katniss, I’m sorry—” he begins, but I cut him off before he goes down that road. I don’t want to hear apologies. I want explanations.  
  
“When did you decide?”  
  
His eyes dart in my general direction before they turn away with his head lowered, but I can still hear his answer. “The first day you came here. When Prim rushed to hold you, and you didn’t push her away like the other Katniss.”  
  
“What?” I bellow out. “You’d decided that very day and said nothing?”  
  
His head dips lower, and at first, I don’t think he’s going to say anything in his defense, but then he does. “That’s when I knew that you were agreeable enough to consider marriage, but then I thought what harm would there be if I spent a little more time to see if we could actually like to be around each other.”  
  
“And?” I ask, raising my brows and wait for his answer.  
  
“And I took you to my favorite spot in this city, and I knew…” he stops as I find myself leaning in, waiting for his answer, “I knew that it could be more than that.”  
  
“So why didn’t you say anything then?” I ask, my curiosity has replaced my anger completely, causing the edge in my voice to soften considerably.  
  
“I was selfish,” he repeats the answer he’d given his brother earlier, and I feel the anger slowly returning but then he continues. “I knew that once you fulfilled the other Katniss’s dying wish, you’d leave. I told myself a day here, three days there, until we reached my city, when we returned here, but all of it was for the same reason: I didn’t want to let you go. I’m so sorry, Katniss.”  
  
“Then why didn’t you tell me on our way here?”  
  
“I had to get you back here safely. If I told you, you would have lost trust in me and make it that much harder to return you safe and sound to this city.”  
  
I’m conflicted. It’s flattering that all he wanted was more time with me, but his lies put everyone I’ve come to care for in danger, including himself. I can barely bring myself to look at him, but there’s one more question I have.  
  
“Marriage? You said we were already married. I don’t remember a ceremony.”  
  
His eyes are frantically looking around the chamber and his whole body flushes. He can’t even control his lights that are flashing erratically. I know this pattern. It’s embarrassment, but its brighter, faster. It’s something that makes him extremely uncomfortable.  
  
“I thought it was the same above, on land. I guess Sae thought so too,” he says, fishing through his satchel and reaches deep for something. I use the fins at my hips to drift closer to him, my curiosity piqued.  
  
He holds his fist out to me and his fingers unfurl to reveal the pearl he fished from what I thought was a stony floor, but thinking about it, could have been a bed of oysters.  
  
He’d presented the pearl to his brother, but I’m still not sure why. I look at it’s round shape and pearlescent coating and then look at him, but a flicker catches my eye. I move in closer for a better look at the orb and see something flickering like a pulse. The tiny dot is even red. I move in closer until my nose is practically touching it, and I see that it’s not flickering, it’s beating. It’s a tiny heart. My gills can’t take in enough oxygen and I reach for them reflexively in panic. “How?” I manage out, and Peeta tucks what I now know to be an egg back into his satchel, and in an instant, he’s beside me, holding me steady. I’m thankful for it because I have no idea which way is up anymore, and his touch is comforting…grounding.  
  
Softly, gently, he speaks as he pulls me closer to him. “When we swam together…that night…and you spiraled around me, that was the start of...” he lets whatever thought trail as he grapples with what to say next.  “I thought you knew. I thought it was the same with those on land. I was honored that you chose me. Not the third son of the Setting Sun, but me. And then…after…I realized that you didn’t know what the egg was. You didn’t understand what it all meant, that we married.”  
  
Suddenly it occurs to me that the word for “marriage” isn’t straight-forward. I hadn’t thought much about it’s full meaning before, but after hearing his words, I realize that it doesn’t just mean a binding arrangement, but also “mating”. The word means both concepts and I’m starting to understand that marriage and mating are one in the same to these underwater people.  
  
What we did that night was a mating and a marriage ritual all rolled up into one. Something else occurs to me. Gale…I mean Peeta, had told me that females die all of the time, but I assumed he meant during childbirth. There is no childbirth, there’s only an egg. I remember when Peeta held me so tightly that I lost consciousness. Was that when females are likely to die? During…  
  
I start to swear in the language above water and choke, sputtering and struggling to breathe through my gills again as I slip out of his arms. Peeta tries to hold me again, but I don't want him to touch me. It's all to much for me, so I jerk away from his reach. I can't even look at him with all that I'm feeling, so I do the only thing I can do, I swim out of the main chamber and away from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this story, mermaid reproduction is similar to fish reproduction which I had to ask for help on this. The person didn't want a shout-out for fish sex so I'll just say, thanks so much for the help, and you know who you are. ;)
> 
>  
> 
> _When you leave a comment, a fanfic fairy gets her wings._


	9. Pillar of Stone

With Prim at my side, I float quietly near the wall of the main chamber as we watch the flurry of activity. It’s not just in here; everyone in the city is abuzz with the news that the first child of the city will soon become the mother of Fire, that there will be a new first child of the city. It takes me a few seconds to remember that when they speak of Katniss, the mother of Fire, they’re talking about me.

Several guards of the city haul an enormous slab of stone to the center of the main chamber, and then float nearby, waiting for something. I’m not sure why the guards or the stone are here or why I’m here for that matter. All I know is that Sae told me it was for the egg, and it’s important for me to be here.

Johanna swims into the chamber and stops at my other side with her eyes steady on the stone. “He’ll do a good job. You’ll see,” she tells me, but I’m not sure what the job will be, although I think I have some idea of who “he” is.

She doesn’t say anything more as we wait. In fact, those were the most words she’s said to me since her demotion, when she thanked me for refusing Sae’s request to banish her from the city. As pending mother of the city, even if I’m not really Katniss, I have more than a little say in the decisions here. I couldn’t have Johanna banished, even if she did betray our trust in her, trust being crucial as leader of the guards and my protector.

There’s some movement at an entrance of the main chamber. Peeta and his brother, Wade, swim inside and stop when they reach the stone.

Prim folds her arms across her chest as her lips press together tightly. There's a angry flick of her tail fin, and with each second passing, her brows dip further and further downward. For the last day and a half, she’s made no secret of her lingering resentment, that she hasn’t forgiven Peeta.

There are tools near the slab of stone that I hadn’t noticed before, and Peeta and his brother pick them up, moving them in their hands to get a feel for them while eying the slab.

Switching the tools so that they are in one hand, Peeta uses his now free hand to slide over the surface of the slab, feeling each bump and groove in its texture. It’s not long before both of them are chiseling at the stone, carving complexity into what was such a simple form. There are times when some of the guards unfold what at first looks to be a blanket, but when they methodically spread it out and slowly surround the growing cloud of dust and debris, it’s clear is more for filtering the water as the two mermen work.

By the time they’re done, the slab of stone has been turned into an exquisite column with a wide base that tapers towards the middle, then flares out again towards the top into a shallow bowl. It looks like a fountain to me, but what good is a fountain down here?

Sae comes into the chamber with her hands cupped the same way Peeta had when he presented the egg to his brother. She doesn’t stop swimming until she’s in front of me. Her stoicism falters when she notices Johanna’s floating beside me, but the she regains her composure and focuses her steady gaze on me; her hands open to reveal the egg.

I still see a pearl, at first, but just under the surface is that tiny pulse of red that mesmerizes me. My child is in there. A small part of me that will somehow grow to be one of these people. The sudden flicker of Sae’s tale makes me realize that everyone is waiting for me to take it. The truth is, I’ve never held it, and a bolt of fear streaks through me. “Place it on the pedestal,” Sae tells me but the best I can manage is to have my hands hover close to her hands, to the egg, because I’m too afraid to touch it.

“What if I crack it?” I say very softly, almost too softly for my mentor to hear.

“You won’t. It’s tough at this stage,” she replies just as softly, motioning her hands closer to me, insisting I take it from her.

My gills work hard for me to breathe as I scoop the tiny sphere into my hands. It’s smooth like glass and very warm. I look up to see the expectant eyes of Sae, and behind her is Peeta floating at one side of his creation while his brother is at the other side. They both look exhausted, but more than that, Peeta looks nervous. I think I may even see an uncontrolled flash of his lights.

As I swim to the highest point of the pedestal, I rub circles around the smooth surface of the egg with my thumb, finding a strange bit of comfort in its warmth. The bowl top of the pillar has a gradual curve to it inside that’s perfectly rounded. I place it in the center and it's so tiny inside it, but as I study the outward curve of the sides, it occurs to me that the bowl shape is made to accommodate a bigger egg. My egg will grow. I'm so lost in my thoughts about my egg that it takes me a few moments to notice how everyone in the chamber are swishing their tails and crying out in high pitched sounds that that I’ve come to know as cheering, everyone except for Peeta. Instead, he’s looking at me as though he’s lost something, and I can’t bear to look at him for longer than a moment. Perhaps Prim isn’t the only one who hasn’t forgiven him.

Wade moves in close, and wraps his arms around his brother who reluctantly shifts his gaze from me to him. There's so much emotion between them that it feels as though this is somehow a momentous occasion for them. Sae and Prim are near me, and Prim hugs me before Sae can get her turn.

Deep brown and yellow in my periphery draws my attention to the side, and I see Johanna at the entrance poised to leave. She gives me a nod with her lips slightly upturned in what would be a smile if not for the regret etched everywhere else on her face before she leaves the main chamber.

I’m startled by a pair of strong arms wrapped around me. It’s Wade, and I hadn’t notice him come near me, but now I’m surrounded by him. His arms don’t feel intrusive anymore, now that it’s clear nothing more is meant than brotherly affection. It’s so loving and welcoming that I surprise myself by hugging him back. “I’m so glad Peeta found you,” he says to me softly in my ear so that only I can hear him. “For a while, our brother and I didn’t know if Peeta would ever choose a wife. No one was ever smart enough, or pretty enough, or sincere enough. It was almost as though he were waiting. I guess he was waiting for you.”

He releases me, but his words cause my heart to beat twice as fast and my body to freeze in the water. The only part of my body that moves is my eyes that meet a pair of blue similar to Wade’s. Peeta. I turn away quickly.

Waiting for me? I’m not sure how that could be. Especially since I’m not the real Katniss. All I am is some human who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I can’t help but lift my eyes to meet his again and strangely feel that I may have been in the right place at the right time.

* * *

Sae has taken a comfortable position, floating in front of me and Prim but her words are more background noise when I really should be listening. Having come to her attention that I had no idea about the specifics of mermaid sexuality, not to mention the fear of it happening again, it’s now that I get the underwater equivalent of “the talk.”

And for good measure, so that it’s not overlooked, Prim’s subjected to this humiliation as well.

“…so the tight, firm hold he has on her causes…” Sae continues, but she’s interrupted by a loud whining sound that comes from Prim. Her face is scrunched tightly with eyes closed and hands pressed to her ears.

“Prim?” I say her name gently as I touch her arm and she shrugs away from me.

She does open her eyes, though, and notices Sae’s stopped speaking. “I can’t hear anymore! This is what Katniss and not-Gale did!”

Not-Gale. It’s what she’s come to call him now having still not forgiven him.

I half listen to Sae try to reason with Prim, explaining that these are things she will need to know, but the girl I’ve come to love as my sister can’t stop cringing and covering her ears. “Sae, let her go. She needs time to adjust to it all,” I tell our mentor, but the truth is that we all do, myself included.

The elder woman nods and lowers her head, which frees Prim. Just before she races out of the chamber, she gives me a sad smile of gratitude, and then she’s gone, leaving me and Sae alone.

“When he brought you back that night, I had a feeling…” she begins, but lets the thought trail. I remember her eyes on me that night, the look of concern and perhaps disapproval. “I just didn’t know that you didn’t know.”

“Now, I know,” I say softly as I eye the top of the pillar in the center of the main chamber. I’m not sure if it was really to her or if it was just a declaration for me, because I do know, more than I ever really wanted to know. Part of me thought that I would marry the third son of the Setting Sun and jaunt back to land the moment the marriage ceremony was finished. In my mind, the other expectations of marriage could be avoided quickly and quietly by returning to land and my new husband would assume I died, losing a wife he never really knew.

Unfortunately it’s nowhere near as clean and simple as that. My husband knows me and wants me. That was made clear by his reasons for not telling us sooner about his identity. And if I must be honest with myself, I can’t say I wouldn’t miss him either. And Prim, and Sae, and even Johanna.

And then there’s the other complication: the egg. How can I return to land knowing that I have a child out here without me?

I think “the talk” is done whether Sae wanted it to be or not. Neither Sae nor I have the stomach for the rest, so she leaves the main chamber and speaks with Boggs, the new leader of the guards.

Alone in the chamber, I swim up to the top and curl myself around the inside of the bowl so that the egg is nestled below me. I can feel its warmth, and watch as it’s tiny pulse flutters just beneath the shell. In the last couple of days, I’ve spent my extra time this way, wondering what it will become, what it will be like to watch the egg break open and a tiny little boy or girl with a fish tail swim. It’s a strange feeling, one human men have been dealing with for millennia, that as a parent I have no involvement with the birth of my child. I’m a human woman, taught to expect pregnancy and labor, and here I am, waiting for an egg to hatch. And then I feel the twist in my stomach when I remember that I may not be here for that.

There's a soft sound and I lift my head to see blond hair and a soft pink tail, so I raise myself completely to greet Prim. She leans her elbows on the edge of the bowl while her tail swishes back and forth as she studies the egg. “I really don’t want to hear what happened between you and him, but that’s my niece or nephew,” Prim says proudly as she points to it. “I’m going to teach her so much when…”

She doesn’t finish because we know the rest. …when it hatches, when I’m gone, when it starts its life with no mother. She doesn’t have to say the words for it to feel like my insides are being ripped from me. I’m reminded of how strange this is, that I have a son or daughter growing in there, not inside my body like I’ve spent most of my life taught to expect. Confused is the only word I can come up with to describe what I feel, but there’s so much more that I can’t describe.

It only highlights that other feeling inside me, the one I’ve been trying to ignore. With each passing day since I’ve learned that I’m already married and expecting my first child, I feel a pull towards land. At first, it was just a thought here and there that I must return to the beach. The thought has now become a crave like a sweet tooth for candy. Sae tells me that it’s starting, that I fulfilled my purpose for being here and the Float is calling me back to land.

At first, I ignored it because I had to be Katniss for when Peeta’s brother was here, for when Peeta built the pedestal for the egg. I continued to ignore it so that I could say goodbye to his brother and Finnick, and for Prim when she wanted to swim through the city with me to gather herbs for Sae and Johanna. I know I’m making excuses, prolonging the inevitable. I know I belong on land where I come from, but there are things that anchor me here, and I can’t bear to leave them. That’s when it suddenly occurs to me that Peeta’s reasons for prolonging the inevitable weren’t that unfathomable. All he wanted was more time. I’m reminded of a simple truth I’d learned years ago when I lost my mother and father: we’ll do anything for a little more time with the ones we love.

I realize I’ve drifted into my own thoughts when I see Prim staring at me. She’s been on edge, and Sae thinks it’s because she knows that the time for me to leave is approaching, even if we haven't said anything to her. I try to relax my face muscles as best I can and give her a warm, loving smile but I can feel the tension and see it reflected in her expression. “You’ll make a wonderful aunt,” is all I can say to make her feel better, even if it’s only by a little bit, and pull her in close to me, wrapping my arms around her.

Her little arms wrap around me.

There’s a glint of golden hair at the entrance of the main chamber. I call out, “Peeta!” The name feels strange when calling for him, but I have to get used to the fact that it is his name.

He stops swimming and tentatively eases back and through the doorway. He’s been avoiding me since his brother left, I’m sure giving me time and space to adjust to the new realities, but we can’t do this any longer. I don’t know how much time I have left as the pull is growing more insistent by the day. My revelation in wanting a little more time down here has given me some insight, some perspective and a ton of forgiveness. I can’t blame him for wanting to see what he had to marry. I can’t even fault him for delaying telling us his decision. The thought actually warms me because all he wanted was just a little bit more time…with me. With the decreasing amount of time I have, I think it’s time to let him know that I've finally forgiven.

Prim squeezes me tighter before letting me go and leaving the large chamber. When she passes Peeta, for the first time she doesn’t frown at him. Perhaps she’s on her own road to forgiving him as well.

Peeta and I are alone in the main chamber, and his eyes don’t meet mine, but that’s okay. I take in his appearance fully. He’s allowing the dye to fade completely from his hair, and most of it has already faded into patches of golden. It’s still strange seeing him this way, but I know that this is the man I loved to spend time with whether his hair is black or blond, whether his name is Gale or Peeta.

He tentatively swims up beside me curving his body around the other half of the bowl with the egg below us. Quietly, we both watch the beating heart of what will be the first child of the City of Fire. Our child.

His hand reaches out to me, and I can see it trembling with apprehension. In his eyes, I see his need to have me close, but there’s worry as well. He’s worried that I’ll reject his offered hand, and if I’m to listen to Sae’s warnings during “the talk,” I should. A mated pair—the fact that it’s what he and I are is taking some time to wrap my brain around—should avoid physical contact as much as possible. “Touch leads to arousal,” her words echo in my head, but a part of me scoffs at her warning. She sounds more like the gym teachers who teach sex ed classes. Of course touch leads to arousal. Dammit, just looking at him leads to arousal.

I think the important part of it all has more to do with her second warning: “Arousal and motion lead to mating.” We’re in the main chamber. It’s large, but it’s not large enough for me to spiral around him—evidently a signal that I’m ready to mate. Not to mention, it’s been so long since I’ve felt his warm skin against mine that I ignore Sae’s warning and accept his hand to mine.

There’s a long release from his gills as his body relaxes, and the areas where our skin touch tingle.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but I shake my head. Apologies are no longer needed, and I demonstrate this to him by pulling up close and wrapping my arms around his neck with a warm smile. We've drifted away from the pillar and our bodies sway in time to a comfortable rhythm as I look up to find blue eyes—the very blue eyes that have been my constant in all of this—staring back down at me.

I press my lips to his, and they part for me instantly, granting access to the feel of his tongue. We're swaying with a frenzy of tangled arms and lips and tongues until it consumes us. His hands find their way down to my waist and my body tingles everywhere our bodies meet. My heart is racing, and my thoughts become hazy. This time I can recognize the signs, and perhaps he can as well because we break away from each other at the same time.

Peeta’s gills are fluttering wildly for breath and I'm sure mine are the same the way because I can barely breathe. It seems circling him while swimming isn't the only trigger as I trace the lingering tingle from where his lips were on mine.

“You’ll be the death of me,” I tell him. It was meant to be a joke, but the problem is that it's the truth. Even now, looking at his startled, wide eyes and parted lips, I want him. I want the feel of his arms around me and the taste of his lips and tongue, and I wonder if I'm going to live long enough to return to land.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Edit:** I meant to put this here when posting, but completely forgot. I'll repost this note in the next chapter for those that have read this chapter before this edit.
> 
> The topic of fish sex. I went into this story with a dilemma. I wanted merfolk reproduction to be different from human reproduction, but I didn't want the only method that I knew of (laying eggs and broadcasting sperm) because no touching is involve. Couldn't have that! So I went to my resource, discussed a few methods where there's physical contact and decided on betta reproduction (with some changes, of course).
> 
> I doubt anyone would, but some of you did seemed a _little_ curious so I'm offering. If you can't take it anymore and your curiosity's getting the better of you about merfolk birds and bees, PM me over at FF and I'll give you a Sae-like version of what I decided. Didn't have it in this chapter because I didn't want any more corrupting of minds than I've already done. ;)


	10. Resisting the Uprush

Sometime in the night I find myself just outside of the city. My thoughts are nothing but a jumble that I can’t make sense of because it’s mostly feelings and images. If I try to hold on to one of them for more than a second, it’s slips through into another thought and then another.

There are sounds that are familiar to me, but it’s so far away that I can barely make out what it is until a pair of strong hands clasp my shoulders. Slowly, the jumble of thoughts focus on the sounds and what they mean. “Katniss!” It’s a name. Is it my name? My blurry vision finally takes in the handsome, blond man holding me, his eyes frantic and desperate.

He’s making sounds, but their meaning has been lost to me. As I regain more of my focus, I remember that his name is Gale. No. His name is Peeta. The details start to flood back into my brain.

I’m under water.  
He’s my husband.  
We have a child, no, an egg back in the city.

I blink a few times to rid myself of my blurry vision, and his sounds slowly start to make sense to me again. “Katniss! Where were you going? What are you doing out here?”

“Peeta?” I try out the name, and it feels strange. The problem is that I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been used to called him Gale, or because these sounds suddenly feel foreign to me.

To prove to myself that he’s really there, I reach out to touch him with my fingers, gliding over his skin and into his golden hair. “Your hair used to be black. Real or not real?” I ask him, because frankly it all seems more on the not real side.

“Real,” he answers and pulls me into a tight embrace, although I do catch the look of utter terror in his face before I nestle my head in the crook of his neck. I feel safe here even if I’m not quite sure where I am.

* * *

Twice I found myself outside of the city and disoriented before Peeta and Sae agreed to have a guard placed outside of my personal chamber at night. Even with a guard always there, I still wake up in unusual places. It’s no longer outside of the city, but now it’s at the exits when guards wake me.

Sae tells me what I already know: it’s the float. It’s calling me back no matter how much I fight it, no matter how much I ignore the pull to land.

This time, very early in the morning, I wake up choking. The guard outside of my chamber rushes inside to see what’s wrong with me, but by the time he reaches my side, I already know what it is and correct it. For some reason while sleeping, I switch from breathing with my gills to breathing with my lungs. The only time this has happened since I’ve been down here is when I do it on purpose.

Boggs is at the entrance of my chamber in a heartbeat and my guard tells him what’s happened before the leader of the guards disappears. The next thing I know, Peeta, Sae, Prim, and even Johanna are swimming to me, lights flashing and panicked looks on their faces.

“You couldn’t breathe?” Prim asks me.

“All of the instincts you were born with are returning,” Sae explains, even though I don’t want her to. I wish she would stop telling me what I already know.

There’s a look that’s shared between Peeta, Sae, and Johanna, their faces grim and lips tight. Prim’s oblivious, but if they’re thinking what I think they’re thinking, I’m glad she is.

I can’t stay here anymore. I have to succumb to the float, go back to the shore. I pull the small girl into my arms and hug her tightly as though this will keep me anchored here.

I realize Prim’s not as oblivious as I thought she was when she says, muffled by her face buried in my side, “You have to go, don’t you?”

I pull apart from her just enough so that I can nod, because I don’t want to say the words. Before I can, Johanna turns to Sae, even with their relationship as strained as it is, and asks, “Isn’t there something in that myth of yours that can help her stay?” It surprises me that it comes from Johanna. I’ve had the feeling since my first day here that she didn’t particularly like me, and from there we’ve developed a relationship solely based on mutual respect at best. But the way the sound of her voice tightens and her lights flash once from emotions that are barely within her control, I wonder if I’d underestimated it.

“Don’t you think I would have told her by now?” the elder mermaid snarls. “As it goes, there were only two other incidences known. One was killed before he could fulfill his purpose. The other did succeed but left soon after, when she was called back. There’s nothing about staying.”

Prim buries her face in my ribs and curls her little body into me, tucking her soft pink tail fin between us. The mournful pattern of her lights glow, and she doesn’t do a thing to hide them. It’s then that I decide: if I have to return, I’m going to do so on my own terms. I’m not going to wander through the ocean to the shore without even so much as a good bye to those I love here.

I reach for Prim’s face and pry it from my body. “How about we go to the Hob?” I ask her. She smiles at me in agreement, but it’s not the sparkling, glowing smile I’ve seen from her before. This one’s far more subdued, but I won’t let that get in the way.

We set out through the Hob, floating hand in hand. Typically when we do this, Prim’s bursting with energy, swimming from stall to stall, but this time she stays at my side and maintains a calm pace.

“Katniss!” one vendor calls out. “The mother of the city!” another calls. “Thank you for the egg! Our most precious gift!” someone from a stall in the far corner belts out. I’ve heard this before and thought it was strange the first time it was said to me, but after thinking about it, I could’ve died giving this city an heir. So yes, I do deserve their thanks. What they don’t know is that they deserve my thanks as well. I haven’t felt this welcomed anywhere since my parents. I can’t thank them aloud, but I squeeze Prim’s hand and thank each and every one I’ve met down here to myself.

* * *

It’s almost morning, and I can’t sleep. I won’t sleep. Peeta spends it with me talking. “I’m glad it was you, even if only for a short time,” he confesses out of the blue.

“You didn’t want the other Katniss?” I tease. To that, he gives me a curt, “No.”

“She couldn’t have been that bad,” I tell him. With so many people to love her, how could she be? And yet, he gives me the answer I would never in a million years expect.

“She was ready to trade Prim, Katniss.”

“What?” I react, my lights flashing, my tone harsh, so much so that several guards at the entrances of the main chamber peek in to check on the egg.

“I’ve only told Johanna. I couldn’t bear to tell Sae or Prim. The reason why we found you was because I knew where she died. I saw her die. We were coming to retrieve her body. Although, when we found you, Johanna thought I'd imagined her death.”

I shake my head, trying to reconcile what he’s telling me with the decent person I imagined in my head as well as this bit of new information that he saw her die.  “Wait! Start from the beginning.”

“I’d already made up my mind,” he tells me, “that I wouldn’t accept her proposal. I didn’t like the way she treated those around her, including Prim, sweet Prim who reminds me so much of Delly. She was the only reason why I considered that woman at all.”

“How did she die?”

“I guess my answer didn’t come fast enough for her. She found a way out of the city undetected, except I happened to be looking for her to tell her my decision. When I caught her sneaking out, though, I followed her. Where she went, Cato was there waiting for her,” he pauses there and I’m glad. My brain is having an awful time with all of this information, and I need those couple of seconds to prepare for the rest of what Peeta's telling me.

“They were some distance away, but I was able to hear most of the conversation. She wanted to trade Prim so that the City of Silver would leave the City of Fire alone. Cato, however, answered her counter-proposal with a spear. He didn’t have time to aim it properly and wounded her shoulder, but by the time she swam towards shore, Cato speared her stomach. She lived long enough for him to tell her what he really wanted: that he could have both Prim and the City of Fire with her dead. She died right there, shaking her head in disbelief.”

“That’s how he knew I wasn’t Katniss! That’s how you knew he knew. He would’ve had to confess to killing her to prove that I wasn’t the real Katniss.”

He nods, but then takes my hands in his, our bodies maintaining a respectable distance. “But I want to make something clear with the time we have left. You’re more Katniss to me than she could ever be.”

There’s a heat that rushes over my skin as we release our hands quickly.

“I just wish Delly were here to meet you. She would have loved you, probably more than I do.”

I feel that heat burning over my skin, but I ignore it, glossing over the fact that it was close to a declaration of love. “Why would she?”

“Delly used to wonder what life was like up there. She would prattle on endlessly about the things she’d found and the ships she’d seen. To have a real human…as a sister,” he says as he settles back into a floating position, a smile spreading across his face that’s full of so many emotions. “She would have drowned you in questions, though.”

My first reaction is to laugh but I stop myself in time. Laughing doesn’t work underwater. I concentrate and let my lights flicker with the pattern of amusement, but it scares me how easy it was to slip back into human reactions. Peeta’s saying something, but all I can hear in my ears is laughter. It’s my father and mother. They’re playing with me in the backyard again. I chase my father, reaching out to tag him when I’m yanked back.

“Katniss!” The backyard is replaced with the main chamber. My parents are replaced by Peeta. He looks so worried, and I want to ease the tension in his face, but he has every right to be worried.

“That’s new,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. “I haven’t done that awake before.”

His gills are opening and closing in great bursts. “We’re not going to be able to fight this, are we?” It’s the first time he’s acknowledged that all of our efforts were not just to delay the inevitable, but to stop it.

I don’t answer because there’s only one answer and I don’t want to say it, no matter how true it is. Glancing over at the top of the pedestal where I know the egg rests, I close my eyes and picture what it would be like to stay here and watch it hatch open. All I can do is imagine because each day proves that my imagination is all I have left of this world.

* * *

Inside the main chamber, I immediately head for the center of the room, the top of the pillar. The egg’s already grown noticeably since it was placed here.

I curl my body around it inside the bowl of the pillar where it lays, covering it with my body and feeling its warmth. I’ve said my goodbyes to everyone in my own way, even to Johanna. She floated there without a hint of emotion, until her arms wrapped around me without warning. It was a quick hug, and then she was gone. Sae’s goodbye was even shorter. I wanted to tell her how much her guidance meant to me down here. I wanted to tell her that I've never known the love of a grandmother because both were dead by the time I was born, but she was what I imagine them to be. There were so many other things I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t say any of them.

It was hard enough to find her, but when I did, when I opened my mouth to say all of those things, her lights flashed that mournful pattern Prim’s had. It was the first time I’d ever seen Sae’s lights and was completely startled even as she whooshed past me.

I think of Sae. I think of Johanna and Prim and Peeta.

I think of my egg.

“What will you look like?” I ask it softly, my finger playing over the glass-smooth shell that's warm to the touch. “Will they tell you about the mother that comes from land, or will you only know ‘Katniss’?” I feel the prickly burn in my eyes and realize that I’m crying. No one would ever be able to tell here, but knowing that I’m doing this only makes more unseen tears. I’m crying instead of having my lights flash my emotions. I’m having everything that I’ve become taken from me little by little.

“Will your father bring you above water to breathe air?”

I startle when I actually get an answer. “Of course.”

Peeta's near the pillar, and by the look on his face, it’s clear it’s time for me to go. I can’t put this off any longer, and I’ve said my goodbyes.

At the exit of the city Peeta leads me to, Prim’s waiting. “Johanna said she had duties. Sae said she didn’t want to lose another…” she says, letting the rest float away before the three of us swim to the outskirts of the city boundaries near the shore I’d come from.

Prim’s the first to pull me into one last hug. “Don’t forget us, Katniss,” she says to me in my ear.

When she releases me, Peeta takes hold of me, and at first I fear that he may squeeze me like mating. His arms are tight around me, but not that tight, and I hear Sae’s words in my head, “Mating starts with the mind.” I can definitely say that mating is far from our minds, so in these last moments underwater we can touch. I’m thankful, especially when I feel my tail fin snagged. I look down to see the tendrils of seaweed wrapped around it, worming it’s way up my tail and towards the rest of my body. Peeta doesn’t let me go; Prim’s lights are flashing wildly with emotions I can't read fast enough.

“Peeta! Let me go!”

“No!” he refuses and holds me tighter as though strength alone can keep me here.

“You have to,” I say to him just as the seaweed reaches my chest, “for Prim and the egg.”

At that, his arms release me and the seaweed doesn’t hesitate to take his place along my body. I’m covered to my upper chest, and then they cover my arms just as I see movement beyond the two.

By the time my neck and mouth are covered, I can see what the movement is clearly. There are a handful of mermen with weapons, and their leader is Cato. My eyes widened with terror doesn’t get Prim or Peeta's attention at first, perhaps thinking I’m panicking from being covered this way, but they do turn and see the mermen after a few moments. Prim’s quickly seized by one of them while Peeta immediately launches for Cato. All I can see before my eyes are covered is them locked in battle with nothing but a flurry of tails.

I try to call for them but I can’t speak. I try to reach out to them, but I can’t move. I’m uselessly cocooned in the seaweed that will make me human again.


	11. Forever Bound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually had this done Thurs, but the holiday weekend kept me busy. I hope you guys enjoy

Even though I’m in nothing but darkness with this seaweed cocoon wrapped around me, I fight it. In my mind, I can see Prim in Cato’s clutches and Peeta fighting for their lives which is enough to fuel my struggle against it, even as my muscles burn with the effort. Each moment that passes, I can feel the cocoon solidifying around me, hardening against my skin. There's a tingle along the length of my tail down the center and even though I can’t see what’s going on, I’m pretty sure it’s being split into two, what will become my two legs.

My efforts are doubled, and I don’t care how tired I am. All I can think about is the danger Peeta and Prim are in, and by extension Sae, Johanna, and the rest of the city.

Suddenly the darkness isn’t so dark. There’s something far away swimming towards me.The shape is hard to make out, but the coloring is unmistakable with a orange and yellow tail that’s highlighted by red. Every time it swishes in the water it looks like fire flickering. There’s a cloud of black hair that trails behind the mermaid’s face, a face that’s all too familiar to me, now. She stops in front of me and levels her gray eyes with mine, and for a split second, I wonder if my eyes are still gray or have they reverted back to my human brown.

“Katniss?” I ask, but quickly realize that I’m not speaking with my mouth but I can hear my voice all the same. It’s in my head, it has to be. It’s all my imagination, which has her nodding at this very moment.

This Katniss floats in the water in front of me, every bit as poised and regal as I’d imagined, as I could never live up to. “We finally meet,” she says to me.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, but then I feel the tingle at my tail that reminds me to fight, something she’d distracted me from. And then I have to wonder: “Are you here to distract me? To keep me from fighting? It won’t work!”

The other Katniss lowers her eyes, and there’s the barest hint of her head shaking. “ When I did what I did, I told myself that it was for the good of the city.”

I'm distracted again from my task, pretty pissed off with how simple she tries to make it seem. “Trade Prim for the good of the city?” I all but scream out the question, even in my mind. At least she has the good graces to look embarrassed by her words and her actions in life.

“As I lay there, dying, with Cato over me and telling me exactly what his intentions were, I realized it wasn’t for the city. It was to save my own hide.”

I nod at that. “You got that right!”

“I panicked. Although he wasn’t aware of it, I knew my guard, Gale, was the third son of the Setting Sun. I’d overheard him speaking with Johanna. I tried to impress him, but the more I did, the more he would look at me with disdain.”

There’s a small part of me that feels for this woman. It’s such a small part that doesn’t compare to the part of me that’s repulsed by the way she treated Prim and for trying to trade Prim...to Cato. There’s also a very selfish part of me that bubbles up to the surface, and with it guilt. Even in my own mind, it’s hard to own up to it but I do. I’m happy she’s dead. I’m happy that the real Katniss died not only so that Prim wouldn’t be treated so badly, but that I could have a sister and fall in love with Peeta. I could have a family again, even if it was only for a short time in my life. It’s that horribly selfish part of me that’s happy she did everything wrong, because if she hadn’t, I would still be with my aunt, never truly living.

It's a hard pill to swallow, but I have to accept that that selfish part of me isn't much different from that selfish part her.

“I forgive you,” I whisper because I do. Her last wish, her dying breath gave back so much good that, although I don’t know if it’s enough for Prim to forgive her, it’s enough for me to take that leap.

Her eyes lift to meet mine and her gills flutter wildly. She looks as though a huge weight’s been lifted from her.

“I can't make up for all that I've done, but I can give one simple thing. Would you like to stay here?” she asks me, and I don’t waste any time answering, “Yes!”

She doesn’t say anything for a long while, studying me with an intensity that unnerves me. But then she adds, “You will be forever bound to the ocean,” as though that is some kind of hardship for me. That world lost anything meaningful to me when my parents died. All I have left up there is an aunt who I’m not entirely sure has even noticed my disappearance. Down here, I have a family; I’m starting a family. Down here is my world. “I want to stay!”

Katniss smiles at me, her tail flashing with approval and joy. “I’d hoped that’s what you would choose.” She leans in close to me and presses her forehead to mine and instantly the tingling at my tail stops. We separate and she gives me a smile that is a strange mixture of relief, joy, and sorrow before she drifts backwards from me. By the time she’s some distance away, the seaweed around me softens.

“Katniss, thank you!” I call out to her

“For what?” she calls out in return.

“For giving me this life!” It’s a lame thing to say, but it’s all I can come up with, with all that I’m feeling.

“I think it was always meant to be this way,” she says before the darkness starts to swallow her. Before it does completely, she adds, “Katniss, look down!”

It’s an odd thing for her to tell me still being inside the cocoon. I can’t see anything no matter how much I look down so I ignore her and start to work against the seaweed again. I push with my arms and squirm my body, but it doesn’t take much effort before it starts to unravel like loose threads, finally dissolving into the water around me. Quickly, I check my lower body and see Katniss's tail I’ve come to know as my own. My hands feel around for the gills that are still there and working for me. If I had more time, I would have taken a moment to enjoy a full breath, to savor the fact that I was given a choice, but I don’t have that time.

“Prim! Peeta!” I call out. There’s nothing around, and then I remember Katniss’s words. I’m near the shore so the ocean floor isn’t as deep here, which means I don't have to swim too deep to find Peeta’s satchel resting on the sandy floor. It blends into the darker sand, and if I hadn’t been looking, I would have missed it. There’s no way of knowing whether he dropped it or if they removed it from him, but either way it’s my only hope to save them if I can find them.

Inside of it are the bow and arrows I’d expected. I’m now armed and ready to find Prim, Peeta, Cato and his men.

* * *

It takes half the night before I think to swim west, in the direction towards the City of Silver. Sometime well into the night, I find them in the westernmost boundary of my city. Peeta and Prim are bound and kept some distance from each other, guarded by two mermen each while Cato speaks with one of the two men watching Peeta.

Prim is farthest from the rest, so she is the one I rescue first. The distance from where I’m hidden will make this all that much more difficult, but I nock the first arrow and take aim. Fire. Nock. Aim. Fire.

Both guards are down, floating with their clouds of red growing outward from their fatal wounds. Prim’s eyes are wide, and she’s too startled and afraid to even scream which is luck on our side. It gives me a chance to swim to her quickly. At first, she doesn’t see me, but when I start to hack at her binds using a knife from one of the mermen, she blinks continuously. It’s clear she’s deciding whether or not I’m real, but I have no time to allow her to settle the matter in her head. One push in the direction of our city, I softly tell her to go get help.

She’s utterly dumbstruck as she swims away, constantly looking back to make sure I’m still there.

When she’s well out of sight, I swim closer to where Peeta and his captors are. There’s a small seaweed forest near them that I hide myself inside. It gets me close enough to Peeta but Cato happens to swim to him at that very moment. The smug look on the man’s face makes me want to put an arrow directly through it, but I can’t with Peeta so close.

“What am I going to do with you?” he says to Peeta, leaning in close. “To kill you would mean a war with the City of the Setting Sun. Can’t have that now can we?”

Peeta lifts his face to meet Cato’s, and this is the first time I’ve seen it since the float took me and helplessly watched him take on Cato and his men. The blues and purples of his skin makes me wince, but then the anger settles in. When Cato pulls a knife to his throat, my hand grips the bow and I ready another arrow. When I release it and watch how it whips through the water, I know it won’t hit Cato, but it does hit the merman next to him, so I nock another and release. The second merman is floating, but Cato’s already in action, pulling Peeta into his arms with the knife at his throat.

He’s looking around, not sure of where the arrows are coming from, but when he sees me, his eyes widen and his jaw becomes slack. I guess it’s the closest he’s going to come to seeing a ghost…twice.

“Why can’t you stay gone!” he complains petulantly while Peeta’s eyes shoot up to see what Cato’s talking about. There’s so much hope there, and then there’s so much joy and relief even though his life is in danger at this very moment.

“Katniss?”

Peeta saying my name is enough to pull a screeching sound from Cato. I’m sure he must be tired of thinking he’s rid of Katniss only to have her turn up again. I can’t say it doesn’t give me pleasure to bring a little insanity in his life. Also, it gives me an opportunity to target a clear shot for his head, but Cato recovers quickly, effectively adjusting Peeta’s position to shield any vital part of Cato’s body worth aiming for. Peeta resists as best he can, but with his hands bound and a knife to his throat, there’s not much he can do.

“Cato, I’m giving you this one chance. Let him go and we can both leave for our own cities.”

“I still have your sister,” he says, but the quirk of my eyebrows makes him shift his focus to the ever growing cloud of red a little distance away. I don’t have to tell him what he now clearly knows: I’ve already saved Prim.

Peeta’s pulled closer to him, and there’s no way I can get to Cato. My breathing speeds up with my heartbeat, but it keeps a steady rhythm. It takes a while for me to notice that subconsciously, my breathing has aligned itself with the way Peeta’s tail swings from left to right like a pendulum. For Cato, the movement must feel like Peeta thrashing to free himself, but from my perspective, I can see the opportunity he’s opened for me.

Each swing of Peeta’s tail opens a clear shot at Cato; I just have to time it right. Left…right…left…right…fire!

The arrow hits its mark, and Cato cries out in pain one second before Peeta elbows him in the abdomen. Now free, Peeta takes a spear from one of the dead mermen and comes to my side by the time Cato manages to ignore the pain he’s in. His hand is already on his spear strapped to his back, and in response, Peeta grips his tighter and rounds his shoulders, ready for the upcoming fight.

He doesn’t have to. By the time Cato has his spear fully removed from his back strap, I have another arrow nocked and aimed. There’s a calm that washes over me waiting for him to threaten us with it because I know he will. The next two seconds, he doesn’t disappoint. Cato pulls back the spear in the stance that can only be for throwing, and half a second later I release the arrow.

As though in slow motion, I watch it whip through the water and directly for the center of his chest. The impact curves his body inward as it pushes the merman back until he does nothing but float in the water with his own cloud of red spreading out around him. It was a direct hit to his chest, but for some reason I expect him to move, to threaten us more. I don’t expect this to be over, but when Peeta wraps his arms around me, and tells me how he never thought he’d see me again all the while Cato doesn’t move, I think it might be over.

When the war fish arrive with Boggs and Johanna ready for a fight, I start to believe that all of this _is_ finally over.

* * *

There was some debate as to what do with the bodies of Cato and his men, but I made that final decision without further debate. He died within my city’s boundaries, therefore his remains were my responsibility as leader of the city. They were placed in the lava river as all bodies of the dead are in my city. It was an act of respect for the City of Silver, or so my messenger was sent to tell Coriolanus.

The truth was that I didn’t want his body free in the water to come into contact with some hapless human. Although the float is rare, according to Sae, I didn’t want any chance that it would happen with him.

It takes almost a week for us to receive word back from the Father of Silver. He thanks us for the respectful treatment of his son’s body, and offers apologies and assurances that the circumstances surrounding his son’s death are an unfortunate misunderstanding. It all sounds so amicable and settled, but when we received the message, Peeta and I knew it was anything but.

Still, no matter what we’ll have to face, I’ll be here to face it with them. I won’t be going away, called back to a world that isn’t mine anymore. All the same, the twelfth day after the other Katniss gave me this life permanently, I find myself on a secluded shore of a tiny, uninhabited island. It takes a lot of effort, but I pull my body through the sand and lay there on my belly under the sun.

There's the scratchy, gritty sound of something being pulled through the sand behind me before I see Peeta pulls himself beside me and quietly takes in the scenery. I don’t think he’s ever seen trees of any kind the way he stares at each one for a long time, or has felt dry sand the way he fists a handful and watches it spill out through his fingers. His attention shifts from the sand to me, and tests the feel of the sand that’s stuck on my skin.

The grains falls away, but the heat of his touch lingers. I look up to meet his eyes and find that he’s quickly leaning in towards me. His lips ghost over mine, allowing his breath to pass over my skin as I know mine must be doing over his. And then he presses his lips to mine, but the kiss is so different here. His lips, as well as my own, are drier and changes the experience dramatically. There’s still the desire to be close to him, to feel his body against mine but there’s no nagging instinct to feel his arms around me.

The fact that he hasn’t tried to move in closer after several kisses makes it clear that he doesn’t have that need either. The sun was high in the sky when we started, but by the time its further in the west, we have to stop because our bodies are drying out too much. The itch in my scales turns into a painful throb, and I remember what the other Katniss told me: “You will be forever bound to the ocean.”

It’s time for me to go back into the water with my husband to check on our egg and my sister and our city. Being bound to the ocean isn’t bad at all, but as Peeta and I swim back home, careful not to touch each other too much, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with exploring our limits on land, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next will be the epilogue.


	12. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually don’t like to have replies inside notes, but I make an exception when I think someone may have a point that would benefit other readers or others may feel the same way and I should address it. This was one of those occasions. There have been reviewers who've mentioned that some chapters felt a bit rushed.
> 
> In all honesty, this may be the case. I’ll just say that a beta from another fandom had to constantly remind me to slow down and smell the roses, so rushing through a scene/event is a known weakness of mine as a writer. I see the overall picture, but forget that the reader doesn’t see it like I do.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don’t belong to any communities here, therefore I don’t have a beta. To sum it up, this story’s not the best that it can be, but it’s the best that I have. It is what it is. I’ve warned about not having a beta in other stories before, but I guess over time it’s slipped my mind. I’ve added the warning in my stories.

Peeta offers me the squirming thing and I know with the way my nose wrinkles involuntarily and how I can’t bring myself to raise my hands to accept it that this isn’t a good idea. The closer it comes to me, the more it writhes until it’s all but fighting to free itself from him so that it wouldn’t have to be held by me.

I can’t blame it. It’s not like Squiggles and I started our relationship on the right fin, but Peeta’s so determined for us to make peace. Instead of holding my hands out to take the tentacled creature, I simply lift one hand, offering one finger to gently glide over the area Peeta has pointed out, the place where Squiggles loves to be rubbed.

When I pull my hand away and make no movement to do much else, Squiggles calms in Peeta’s hands. We’ve found a truce, a simple offering, not to each other but to Peeta. The large blobs that it uses for eyes shifts to focus on Peeta a half second before I do the same, and it’s clear we both hope this is enough for him, at least for now.

“I guess we can call it progress,” he says, pulling the creature back to his chest as it quickly wraps its tentacles around his neck, and I could swear I see it sigh in relief. It could very well be my imagination, though.

“Sae says it’s time!” calls out a voice I would now recognize anywhere. Prim swims inside the chamber Peeta and I share—something Sae disapproves of often—with her lights flashing and her face beaming. “I’m going to be an aunt!”

Both Peeta and I freeze at the news. We knew it was soon, but we aren’t ready. Is anyone ever really prepared for the arrival of their baby?

I swim past Peeta who’s returning Squiggles to his coral home before he follows us through the corridors and to the main chamber.

Johanna’s there at the largest entrance, her post as one of the guards of the main chamber to protect the egg. She gives me a slight smile, just enough to tell me what she’s thinking: congratulations.

Sae’s waiting for us near the pillar, high above the bowl where the egg now spans it’s full width. There’s such a warm, serene smile on her face that it almost calms me the moment I see it. Almost.

Peeta is the first to reach it, but I’m the first to touch it. My hands splay across the smooth, warm surface checking for the cracks I’m expecting, but there are none. That’s when I turn to Sae. “You said it’s time?”

As though to answer my question, the egg shudders under my fingertips. My eyes jump to Peeta where we hold each other’s gaze. His gills are fluttering wildly as I know mine are as well. There’s another shudder, and this time Peeta lays his hands on it and is rewarded with yet another shudder.

“What if it can’t break the shell?” I ask Sae and don’t bother to suppress the lights that display my fear.

The elder shakes her head and the smile she gives me slides from warm to sympathetic. “It hasn’t been trying for more than a few moments. This can take up to a full day.”

“A day?” I hear the panicked sound of my voice, see the way my tail is flashing like strobe lights, and I can feel my eyes stretching widely in horror. “But it could be…” I begin, but remember it’s not something I should say for everyone to hear, “…it could be half human. It could have more trouble with this. We don’t know.”

“It must be strong enough to release itself from the shell, Katniss,” she tells me, but the words sound so cold to my ears that my fears are stoking my temper. I don’t realize I’m swimming towards her threateningly until I feel Peeta’s hands around my wrists and watch the woman I think of like a mother use the fins at her waist to swim out of my reach.

The sound of Peeta’s gentle voice at my ear calms me more. “It’ll be strong, it’ll be beautiful, because it’ll be ours,” he says, and all of the fight in me leaches out.

I turn myself so that I can hold him, bury my face in his strong chest and draw from his strength. I’m too worried and we’re both too nervous for there to be any affects of touching.

Sae rubs at the back of my shoulders and the comfort from both sides helps tremendously, but also makes me feel guilty for the way I reacted to Sae. As though reading my mind, she says to me softly, "All mother's have this reaction at some point or another." All mermaid mothers I remind myself.

* * *

Sunlight has disappeared from the water completely by the time there’s any more movement from the egg. If ever the merfolk have an equivalent to pacing, I’m doing it. I swim over my egg, back and forth and knowing full well that I’m driving everyone crazy. I’m driving myself crazy.

Several times Sae tried to convince me to go to my chamber or anywhere else but here. When they ask me when was the last time I’ve eaten and I can’t answer, Sae sends Prim to bring me food. It still floats at the side of the main chamber waiting for me to eat it, but I can’t.

The egg trembles for a split second which causes the fins at my hips to work hard to stop my momentum. I still marvel at how much bigger it is from when we first placed it in the pillar. It’s the size of a small watermelon, and the once almost impervious shell is now as thin as fine glass.

If I look close enough, hard enough, I can make out the form of the curled up infant through the pearlescent coating, but I try not to. It only makes me want ignore Sae’s advice and smash the shell to hurry the process along. It’s only a matter of time before I give in and ignore her anyway. There’s a baby in there, my baby.

A cracking sound comes with the next tremble, and Peeta swims up from his position at the side of the pillar holding on to the rim so tightly that I can see his knuckles turn white.

We both watch and wait for the next shudder, the next tremble or cracking sound but it doesn’t come. We slip back into waiting, but there’s another cracking sound, and then another until we see the fissure from the top of the egg to one quarter of the way down.

“Sae! Prim!” I call out, knowing full well that they haven’t gone far, always there to bring me or Peeta whatever we need. Just as I expect, they rush right in within moments.

The four of us are staring at that crack in the egg and twitch when the crack lengthens down the center. The sounds come one after another after that as I imagine my baby finally seeing the world it should be in, the world it wants to be in. Crack, crack, crack is all we hear until it splits in half. There’s nothing but a blur of glowing yellow and orange as it twists and turns, still fighting its way out of the shell it thinks its still inside.

We’re all watching, but it’s Sae who pulls me from my stupor. “Take your daughter, Katniss.”

Daughter. I blink at Sae, then at the squirming little bundle of lights and fins and scales and skin. I reach out and hold my hand against whatever I can touch and she immediately stops, curling her tail around herself much the way I’ve seen Prim do, but tighter.

I pull the curled newborn mermaid into my arms where she unfurls a little so that I can hold her better. My gills can’t take in enough oxygen. My lights are flashing wildly. The muscles of my face are stretched to their limit in a smile, and it’s only now that I notice Boggs and Johanna in the main chamber. They’re floating near Sae and the three of them are watching and waiting for something.

Whatever it is, I don’t care. Peeta comes close but doesn’t touch her. He’s waiting for something as well. I’m about to ask them about it, but I'm distracted by the small face of my daughter nuzzling in and her tiny mouth latches onto my left nipple.

It’s such a foreign feeling that I’m stunned, but then I’m startled by the sudden, joyous sounds around me. My daughter’s nursing, and this is what they were waiting for. Peeta’s hand strokes her forehead and the tiny locks of golden hair. Mid-suckle, her eyes open and they are as gray as mine.

“Let the city know that there is a new first daughter,” Sae orders Boggs, and I glance up just in time to see the sullen look on Johanna’s face. This would've been her job, and it’s written all over her face, if not flashing on her tail, that she was looking forward to it.

“And her name? I must give the city her name,” Boggs says to Sae, but he’s looking at me. Peeta meets my eyes but doesn’t make a sound. All he does is give me a nod that tells me everything. It’s up to me. It’s a lot of responsibility naming her, the future leader of this city. I’m not familiar with names down here other than the names of those I’ve met and there are so many landmines when naming someone after someone else. Not to mention, there may be taboos. I shake my head to clear it of the many thoughts rattling around in there and settle on one.

“Delly. Her name is Delly.”

Peeta’s hand freezes against Delly’s forehead, and he starts to shake his head with terrified eyes. “That name is bad luck, Katniss. Delly died young.”

There it is. I stumbled on a superstition, a fear of bad luck, but I’m unfazed by his fear because I already have an answer for it. “Your sister died because she was desperate to know the world above.” I add with my voice soft so that only he can hear, “But our daughter will grow up knowing, learning, understanding all of the things your sister wished so much to know.”

I watch his brows dip for a long moment before they ease back into a relaxed state and a smile stretches across his face. His eyes drop down to the infant still curled in my arms and nursing greedily. “Delly,” he says as he continues to stroke her forehead again.

Sae gives Boggs a nod and the merman speeds through the water to announce to the city the birth of our daughter, our little mermaid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot about Squiggles after the big reveal and everything else happening in the story. I feel awful about it because the poor thing was lost in the void that is forgotten characters. So thanks to a certain commenter for reminding me and giving me fuel for an added scene!
> 
> Also, I had to add into the story the couple of shout outs to the story most of us grew up with when it comes to mermaids: Delly’s backstory as well as the last line of this epilogue. Hope you guys liked it and I hope you guys enjoyed the story.


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